
Class Jililtl- 
Bonk .0:57—. 



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PRICE, 



SOCIAL 

PROBLEMS 



BY 

HENRY GEORGE 



My endeavor has been to present the mo- 
mentous social problems of our time, unencumbered 
by technicalities and without that abstract reasoning 
which some of the principles of political economy 
require for thorough explanation. — Social Problems. 



Garden City New York 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 



THE COMPLETE WORKS 
OF HENRY GEORGE 



SOCIAL 
PROBLEMS 







Garden City New York 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 



1911 



Cspyright, 1883, by 
Hbnrt GuoBaB 

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rl'Biii 
1 1/i 



TO THE MEMORY 

OP 

FEANCIS GEOEGE SHAW 

" Yea," saitli the Spirit, " that they may rest from their labors ; and 
their works do follow them." 



Then shall they also answer him, saying, "Lord, when 
saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or 
naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto 
thee?" 

Then shall he answer them, saying, "Verily I say 
tmto you. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least 
of these, ye did it not to me."— Matthew. 



KOTE. 

This book was written in New York in 1883, which will 
explain references made in its pages to time and place. 
My endeavor has been to present the momentous social 
problems of our time, unencumbered by technicalities and 
without that abstract reasoning which some of the princi- 
ples of political economy require for thorough explanation. 
I have spoken in this book of some points not touched 
upon, or but lightly touched upon, in '^ Progress and 
Poverty," but there are other points as to which I think it 
would be worth the while of those who may be interested 
by this book to read that. 

Heney George. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Increasing Importance op Social Questions 1 

II. Political Dangers 10 

III. Coming Increase of Social Pressure 20 

IV. Two Opposing Tendencies 30 

V. The March of Concentration 40 

VI. The Wrong in Existing Social Conditions. . . 49 

VII. Is it the Best op all Possible Worlds? ... 58 

VIII. That We all might be Rich 70 

IX. First Principles 81 

X. The Eights op Man 92 

XI. Dumping G-arbage 105 

XII. Over-production 117 

XIII. Unemployed Labor 129 

XIV. The Effects of Machinery 139 

XV. Slavery and Slavery 148 

XVI. Public Debts and Indirect Taxation 161 

XVII. The Functions of Government 171 

XVIII. What We must Do 194 

XIX. The First Great Eeporm 202 

XX. The American Farmer 219 

XXI. City and Country 234 

XXII. Conclusion 241 



APPENDIX 

I. The United States Census Report on the Size of 

Farms 247 

Francis A. Walker, Ph.D., LL.D., and Henry George. 
11. Condition of English Agricultural Laborers . . 276 
William Saunders. 

in. A Piece of Land 282 

Francis G. Shaw. 



SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE INCREASING IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 

THERE come moments in our lives that summon all 
our powers — when we feel that, casting away illu- 
sions, we must decide and act with our utmost intelligence 
and energy. So in the lives of peoples come periods 
specially calling for earnestness and intelligence. 

We seem to have entered one of these periods. Over 
and again have nations and civilizations been confronted 
with problems which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, not 
to answer was to be destroyed ; but never before have 
problems so vast and intricate been presented. This is not 
strange. That the closing years of this century must bring 
up momentous social questions follows from the material 
and intellectual progress that has marked its course. 

Between the development of society and the development 
of species there is a close analogy. In the lowest forms of 
animal life there is little difference of parts ; both wants 
and powers are few and simple; movement seems auto- 
matic; and instincts are scarcely distinguishable from 
those of the vegetable. So homogeneous are some of these 
living things, that if cut in pieces, each piece still lives. 
But as life rises into higher manifestations, simplicity gives 



2 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

way to complexity, the parts develop into organs having 
separate functions and reciprocal relations, new wants 
and powers arise, and a greater and greater degree of intel- 
ligence is needed to secure food and avoid danger. Did 
fish, bird or beast possess no higher intelligence than the 
polyp, nature could bring them forth only to die. 

This law— that the increasing complexity and delicacy 
of organization which give higher capacity and increased 
power are accompanied by increased wants and dangers, 
and require, therefore, increased intelligence — runs through 
nature. In the ascending scale of life at last comes man, 
the most highly and delicately organized of animals. Yet 
not only do his higher powers require for their use a higher 
intelligence than exists in other animals, but without 
higher intelligence he could not live. His skin is too thin ; 
his nails too brittle ; he is too poorly adapted for running, 
climbing, swimming or burrowing. Were he not gifted 
with intelligence greater than that of any beast, he would 
perish from cold, starve from inability to get food, or be 
exterminated by animals better equipped for the struggle 
in which brute instinct suffices. 

In man, however, the intelligence which increases all 
through nature's rising scale passes at one bound into an 
intelligence so superior, that the difference seems of kind 
rather than degree. In him, that narrow and seemingly 
unconscious intelligence that we call instinct becomes 
conscious reason, and the godlike power of adaptation and 
invention makes feeble man nature's king. 

But with man the ascending line stops. Animal life 
assumes no higher form ; nor can we affirm that, in all his 
generations, man, as an animal, has a whit improved. But 
progression in another line begins. Where the develop- 
ment of species ends, social development commences, and 
that advance of society that we call civilization so increases 
human powers, that between savage and civilized man there 



INCEEASING IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 3 

is a gulf so vast as to suggest the gulf between the highly 
organized animal and the oyster glued to the rocks. And 
with every advance upon this line new vistas open. When 
we try to think what knowledge and power progressive 
civilization may give to the men of the future, imagination 
fails. 

In this progression which begins with man, as in that 
which leads up to him, the same law holds. Each advance 
makes a demand for higher and higher intelligence. With 
the beginnings of society arises the need for social intelli- 
gence— for that consensus of individual intelligence which 
forms a public opinion, a public conscience, a public will, 
and is manifested in law, institutions and administration. 
As society develops, a higher and higher degree of this 
social intelligence is required, for the relation of individuals 
to each other becomes more intimate and important, and 
the increasing complexity of the social organization brings 
habihty to new dangers. 

In the rude beginning, each family produces its own 
food, makes its own clothes, builds its own house, and, 
when it moves, furnishes its own transportation. Compare 
with this independence the intricate interdependence of the 
denizens of a modern city. They may supply themselves 
with greater certainty, and in much greater variety and 
abundance, than the savage ; but it is by the cooperation 
of thousands. Even the water they drink, and the arti- 
ficial light they use, are brought to them by elaborate 
machinery, requiring the constant labor and watchfulness 
of many men. They may travel at a speed incredible to 
the savage ; but in doing so resign life and limb to the 
care of others. A broken rail, a drunken engineer, a 
careless switchman, may hurl them to eternity. And the 
power of applying labor to the satisfaction of desire passes, 
in the same way, beyond the direct control of the individ- 
ual. The laborer becomes but part of a great machine, 



4 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

which may at any time be paralyzed by causes beyond his 
power, or even his foresight. Thus does the well-being 
of each become more and more dependent upon the well- 
being of all— the individual more and more subordinate to 
society. 

And so come new dangers. The rude society resembles 
the creatures that though cut into pieces will live; the 
highly civilized society is like a highly organized animal : 
a stab in a vital part, the suppression of a single function, 
is death. A savage village may be burned and its people 
driven off— but, used to direct recourse to nature, they 
can maintain themselves. Highly civilized man, however, 
accustomed to capital, to machinery, to the minute division 
of labor, becomes helpless when suddenly deprived of these 
and thrown upon nature. Under the factory system, some 
sixty persons, with the aid of much costly machinery, 
cooperate to the making of a pair of shoes. But, of the 
sixty, not one could make a whole shoe. This is the 
tendency in all branches of production, even in agriculture. 
How many farmers of the new generation can use the flail ? 
How many farmers' wives can now make a coat from thcc 
wool 1 Many of our farmers do not even make their own 
butter or raise their own vegetables ! There is an enormous 
gain in productive power from this division of labor, which 
assigns to the individual the production of but a few of 
the things, or even but a small part of one of the things, 
he needs, and makes each dependent upon others with 
whom he never comes in contact ; but the social organiza- 
tion becomes more sensitive. A primitive village com- 
munity may pursue the even tenor of its life without feeling 
disasters which overtake other villages but a few miles 
off ; but in the closely knit civilization to which we have 
attained, a war, a scarcity, a commercial crisis, in one 
hemisphere produces powerful effects in the other, while 
shocks and jars from which a primitive community easily 



INCREASING IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 5 

recovers would to a highly civilized community mean 
wreck. 

It is startling to think how destructive in a civilization 
like ours would be such fierce conflicts as fill the history 
of the past. The wars of highly civilized countries, since 
the opening of the era of steam and machinery, have been 
duels of armies rather than conflicts of peoples or classes. 
Our only glimpse of what might happen, were passion fully 
aroused, was in the struggle of the Paris Commune. And, 
since 1870, to the knowledge of petroleum has been added 
that of even more destructive agents. The explosion of 
a little nitro-glycerin under a few water-mains would make 
a great city uninhabitable ; the blowing up of a few rail- 
road bridges and tunnels would bring famine quicker than 
the wall of circumvallation that Titus drew around Jeru- 
salem ; the pumping of atmospheric air into the gas-mains, 
and the application of a match, would tear up every street 
and level every house. The Thirty Years' War set back 
civilization in Germany ; so fierce a war now would all but 
destroy it. Not merely have destructive powers vastly 
increased, but the whole social organization has become 
vastly more delicate. 

In a simpler state master and man, neighbor and 
neighbor, know each other, and there is that touch of the 
elbow which, in times of danger, enables society to rally. 
But present tendencies are to the loss of this. In London, 
dwellers in one house do not know those in the next ; the 
tenants of adjoining rooms are utter strangers to each 
other. Let civil conflict break or paralyze the authority 
that preserves order and the vast population would become 
a terror-stricken mob, without point of rally or principle 
of cohesion, and your London would be sacked and burned 
by an army of thieves. London is only the greatest of 
great cities. What is true of London is true of New York, 
and in the same measure true of the many cities whose 



6 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

hundreds of thousands are steadily growing toward 
millions. These vast aggregations of humanity, where 
he who seeks isolation may find it more truly than in the 
desert ; where wealth and poverty touch and jostle ; where 
one revels and another starves within a few feet of each 
other, yet separated by as great a gulf as that fixed between 
Dives in Hell and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom— they are 
centers and types of our civilization. Let jar or shock 
dislocate the complex and delicate organization, let the 
policeman's club be thrown down or wrested from him, 
and the fountains of the great deep are opened, and quicker 
than ever before chaos comes again. Strong as it may 
seem, our civilization is evolving destructive forces. Not 
desert and forest, but city slums and country roadsides are 
nursing the barbarians who may be to the new what Hun 
and Vandal were to the old. 

Nor should we forget that in civilized man still lurks 
the savage. The men who, in past times, oppressed or 
revolted, who fought to the death in petty quarrels and 
drunk fury with blood, who burned cities and rent empires, 
were men essentially such as those we daily meet. Social 
progress has accumulated knowledge, softened manners, 
refined tastes and extended sympathies, but man is yet 
capable of as blind a rage as when, clothed in skins, he 
fought wild beasts with a flint. And present tendencies, 
in some respects at least, threaten to kindle passions that 
have so often before flamed in destructive fury. 

There is in all the past nothing to compare with the 
rapid changes now going on in the civilized world. It 
seems as though in the European race, and in the nine- 
teenth century, man was just beginning to live— just 
grasping his tools and becoming conscious of his powers. 
The snail's pace of crawling ages has suddenly become 
the headlong rush of the locomotive, speeding faster and 
faster. This rapid progress is primarily in industrial 



INCREASING IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 7 

metliods and material powers. But industrial changes 
imply social changes and necessitate political changes. 
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children 
outgrow clothes. Social progress always requires greater 
intelligence in the management of public affairs ; but this 
the more as progress is rapid and change quicker. 

And that the rapid changes now going on are bringing 
up problems that demand most earnest attention may be 
seen on every hand. Symptoms of danger, premonitions 
of violence, are appearing all over the civihzed world. 
Creeds are dying, beliefs are changing ; the old forces of 
conservatism are melting away. Political institutions are 
failing, as clearly in democratic America as in monarchical 
Europe. There is growing unrest and bitterness among 
the masses, whatever be the form of government, a blind 
groping for escape from conditions becoming intolerable. 
To attribute all this to the teachings of demagogues is like 
attributing the fever to the quickened pulse. It is the new 
wine beginning to ferment in old bottles. To put into 
a sailing-ship the powerful engines of a first-class ocean 
steamer would be to tear her to pieces with their play. So 
the new powers rapidly changing all the relations of society 
must shatter social and political organizations not adapted 
to meet their strain. 

To adjust our institutions to growing needs and changing 
conditions is the task which devolves upon us. Prudence, 
patriotism, human sympathy, and rehgious sentiment, alike 
call upon us to undertake it. There is danger in reckless 
change ; but greater danger in blind conservatism. The 
problems beginning to confront us are grave — so grave 
that there is fear they may not be solved in time to prevent 
great catastrophes. But their gravity comes from indispo- 
sition to recognize frankly and grapple boldly with them. 

These dangers, which menace not one country alone, 
but modern civilization itself, do but show that a higher 



8 SOCIAL PKOBLEMS. 

civilization is struggling to be born— that the needs and 
the aspirations of men have outgrown conditions and 
institutions that before sufficed. 

A civilization which tends to concentrate wealth and 
power in the hands of a fortunate few, and to make of 
others mere human machines, must inevitably evolve 
anarchy and bring destruction. But a civilization is pos- 
sible in which the poorest could have all the comforts and 
conveniences now enjoyed by the rich ; in which prisons 
and almshouses would be needless, and charitable societies 
unthought of. Such a civilization waits only for the social 
intelligence that will adapt means to ends. Powers that 
might give plenty to all are already in our hands. Though 
there is poverty and want, there is, yet, seeming embar- 
rassment from the very excess of wealth-producing forces. 
''Grive us but .a market," say manufacturers, "and we 
wiU supply goods without end ! " " Grive us but work ! " 
cry idle men. 

The evils that begin to appear spring from the fact that 
the application of intelligence to social affaii's has not kept 
pace with the application of intelligence to individual needs 
and material ends. Natural science strides forward, but 
political science lags. With all our progress in the arts 
which produce wealth, we have made no progress in 
securing its equitable distribution. Knowledge has vastly 
increased ; industry and commerce ha,ve been revolution- 
ized ; but whether free trade or protection is best for a 
nation we are not yet agreed. We have brought machinery 
to a pitch of perfection that, fifty years ago, could not have 
been imagined ; but, in the presence of political corruption, 
we seem as helpless as idiots. The East River bridge is 
a crowning triumph of mechanical skill ; but to get it built 
a leading citizen of Brooklyn had to carry to New York 
sixty thousand dollars in a carpet-bag to bribe New York 
aldermen. The human soul that thought out the great 



INCREASING IMPOETANCE OP SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 9 

bridge is prisoned in a crazed and broken body tliat lies 
bedfast, and could watch it grow only by peering tlirougb 
a telescope. Nevertheless, the weight of the immense 
mass is estimated and adjusted for every inch. But the 
skill of the engineer could not prevent condemned wire 
being smuggled into the cable. 

The progress of civilization requires that more and more 
intelligence be devoted to social affairs, and this not the 
intelligence of the few, but that of the many. We cannot 
safely leave politics to politicians, or political economy to 
college professors. The people themselves must think, 
because the people alone can act. 

In a ''journal of civilization" a professed teacher de- 
clares the saving word for society to be that each shall 
mind his own business. This is the gospel of selfishness, 
soothing as soft flutes to those who, having fared well 
themselves, think everybody should be satisfied. But the 
salvation of society, the hope for the free, full development 
of humanity, is in the gospel of brotherhood— the gospel 
of Christ. Social progress makes the well-being of all 
more and more the business of each ; it binds all closer 
and closer together in bonds from which none can escape. 
He who observes the law and the proprieties, and cares 
for his family, yet takes no interest in the general weal, 
and gives no thought to those who are trodden under foot, 
save now and then to bestow alms, is not a true Christian. 
Nor is he a good citizen. The duty of the citizen is more 
and harder than this. 

The intelligence required for the solving of social 
problems is not a thing of the mere intellect. It must 
be animated with the religious sentiment and warm with 
sympathy for human suffering. It must stretch out beyond 
self-interest, whether it be the self-interest of the few or 
of the many. It must seek justice. For at the bottom of 
every social problem we will find a social wrong. 



CHAPTER II. 

POLITICAL DANGERS. 

THE American Republic is to-day unquestionably- 
foremost of the nations— the van leader of modern 
civilization. Of all the great peoples of the European 
family, her people are the most homogeneous, the most 
active and most assimilative. Their average standard of 
intelligence and comfort is higher ; they have most fully 
adopted modern industrial improvements, and are the 
quickest to utilize discovery and invention ; their political 
institutions are most in accordance with modern ideas, 
their position exempts them from dangers and difficulties 
besetting the European nations, and a vast area of unoc- 
cupied land gives them room to grow. 

At the rate of increase so far maintained, the English- 
speaking people of America will, by the close of the 
century, number nearly one hundred million— a popula- 
tion as large as owned the sway of Rome in her palmiest 
days. By the middle of the next century— a time which 
children now born wiU live to see— they will, at the same 
rate, number more than the present population of Europe ; 
and by its close nearly equal the population which, at the 
beginning of this century, the whole earth was believed to 
contain. 

But the increase of power is more rapid than the increase 
of population, and goes on in accelerating progression. 
Discovery and invention stimulate discovery and inven- 

0605 



POLITICAL DANGERS. 11 

tion ; and it is only when we consider that the industrial 
progress of the last fifty years bids fair to pale before the 
achievements of the next that we can vaguely imagine the 
future that seems opening before the American people. 
The center of wealth, of art, of luxury and learning, must 
pass to this side of the Atlantic even before the center 
of population. It seems as if this continent had been 
reserved — shrouded for ages from the rest of the world — 
as the field upon which European civilization might freely 
bloom. And for the very reason that our growth is so 
rapid and our progress so swift ; for the very reason that 
all the tendencies of modern civilization assert themselves 
here more quickly and strongly than anywhere else, the 
problems which modern civilization must meet, will here 
first fully present themselves, and will most imperiously 
demand to be thought out or fought out. 

It is difficult for any one to turn from the history of the 
past to think of the incomparable greatness promised by 
the rapid growth of the United States without something 
of awe— something of that feeling which induced Amasis 
of Egypt to dissolve his alliance with the successful Polyc- 
rates, because ''the gods do not permit to mortals such 
prosperity." Of this, at least, we may be certain: the 
rapidity of our development brings dangers that can be 
guarded against only by alert intelligence and earnest 
patriotism. 

There is a suggestive fact that must impress any one 
who thinks over the history of past eras and preceding 
civilizations. The great, wealthy and .powerful nations 
have always lost their freedom ; it is only in small, poor 
and isolated communities that Liberty has been main- 
tained. So true is this that the poets have always sung 
that Liberty loves the rocks and the mountains ; that she 
shrinks from wealth and power and splendor, from the 
crowded city and the busy mart. So true is this that 



12 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

philosophical historians have sought in the richness of 
material resources the causes of the corruption and enslave- 
ment of peoples. 

Liberty is natural. Primitive perceptions are of the 
equal rights of the citizen, and political organization 
always starts from this base. It is as social development 
goes on that we find power concentrating, and institutions 
based upon the equality of rights passing into institutions 
which make the many the slaves of the few. How this is 
we may see. In all institutions which involve the lodg- 
ment of governing power there is, with social growth, a 
tendency to the exaltation of their function and the cen- 
tralization of their power, and in the stronger of these 
institutions a tendency to the absorption of the powers of 
the rest. Thus the tendency of social growth is to make 
government the business of a special class. And as 
numbers increase and the power and importance of each 
become less and less as compared with that of all, so, for 
this reason, does government tend to pass beyond the 
scrutiny and control of the masses. The leader of a 
handful of warriors, or head man of a little village, can 
command or govern only by common consent, and any 
one aggrieved can readily appeal to his fellows. But 
when the tribe becomes a nation and the village expands 
to a populous country, the powers of the chieftain, without 
formal addition, become practically much greater. For 
with increase of numbers scrutiny of his acts becomes 
more difficult, it is harder and harder successfully to 
appeal from them, and the a,ggrega,te power which he 
directs becomes irresistible as against individuals. And 
gradually, as power thus concentrates, primitive ideas are 
lost, and the habit of thought grows up which regards the 
masses as born but for the service of their rulers. 

Thus the mere growth of society involves danger of the 
gradual conversion of government into something indepen- 



POLITICAL DANGERS. 13 

dent of and beyond the people, and the gradual seizure of 
its powers by a ruling class— though not necessarily a class 
marked off by personal titles and a hereditary status, for, 
as history shows, personal titles and hereditary status do 
not accompany the concentration of power, but follow it. 
The same methods which, in a little town where each 
knows his neighbor and matters of common interest are 
under the common eye, enable the citizens freely to govern 
themselves, may, in a great city, as we have in many cases 
seen, enable an organized ring of plunderers to gain and 
hold the government. So, too, as we see in Congress, and 
even in our State legislatures, the growth of the country 
and the greater number of interests make the proportion 
of the votes of a representative, of which his constituents 
know or care to know, less and less. And so, too, the 
executive and judicial departments tend constantly to pass 
beyond the scrutiny of the people. 

But to the changes produced by growth are, with us, 
added the changes brought about by improved industrial 
methods. The tendency of steam and of machinery is to 
the division of labor, to the concentration of wealth and 
power. Workmen are becoming massed by hundreds and 
thousands in the employ of single individuals and firms ; 
small storekeepers and merchants are becoming the clerks 
and salesmen of great business houses ; we have already 
corporations whose revenues and pay-rolls belittle those 
of the greatest States. And with this concentration grows 
the facility of combination among these great business 
interests. How readily the railroad companies, the coal 
operators, the steel producers, even the match manufac- 
turers, combine, either to regulate prices or to use the 
powers of government ! The tendency in all branches of 
industry is to the formation of rings against which the 
individual is helpless, and which exert their power upon 
government whenever their interests may thus be served. 



14 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

It is not merely positively, but negatively, that great 
aggregations of wealth, whether individual or corporate, 
tend to corrupt government and take it out of the control 
of the masses of the people. "Nothing is more timorous 
than a million doUars— except two million dollars." Great 
wealth always supports the party in power, no matter how 
corrupt it may be. It never exerts itself for reform, for 
it instinctively fears change. It never struggles against 
misgovernment. "When threatened by the holders of 
political power it does not agitate, nor appeal to the peo- 
ple ; it buys them off. It is in this way, no less than by 
its direct interference, that aggregated wealth corrupts 
government, and helps to make politics a trade. Our 
organized lobbies, both legislative and Congressional, rely 
as much upon the fears as upon the hopes of moneyed 
interests. When " business " is dull, their resource is to 
get up a bill which some moneyed interest wiU pay them 
to beat. So, too, these large moneyed interests wiU sub- 
scribe to pohtical funds, on the principle of keeping on 
the right side of those in power, just as the railroad com- 
panies deadhead President Arthur when he goes to Florida 
to fish. 

The more corrupt a government the easier wealth can 
use it. Where legislation is to be bought, the rich make 
the laws ; where justice is to be purchased, the rich have 
the ear of the courts. And if, for this reason, great wealth 
does not absolutely prefer corrupt government to pure 
government, it becomes none the less a corrupting influ- 
ence. A community composed of very rich and very poor 
falls an easy prey to whoever can seize power. The very 
poor have not spirit and intelligence enough to resist ; the 
very rich have too much at stake. 

The rise in the United States of monstrous fortunes, the 
aggregation of enormous wealth in the hands of corpora- 
tions, necessarily implies the loss by the people of govern- 



POLITICAL DANGERS. 15 

mental control. Democratic forms may be maintained, 
but there can be as much tyranny and misgovernment 
under democratic forms as any other— in fact, they lend 
themselves most readily to tyranny and misgovernment. 
Forms count for little. The Romans expelled their kings, 
and continued to abhor the very name of king. But under 
the name of Caesars and Imperators, that at first meant no 
more than our '' Boss," they crouched before tyrants more 
absolute than kings. We have already, under the popular 
name of ^'bosses," developed political CaBsars in munici- 
palities and states. If this development continues, in time 
there will come a national boss. We are young ; but we 
are growing. The day may arrive when the ''Boss of 
America " wiU be to the modern world what Csesar was to 
the Eoman world. This, at least, is certain : Democratic 
government in more than name can exist only where 
wealth is distributed with something like equality— where 
the great mass of citizens are personally free and inde- 
pendent, neither fettered by their poverty nor made sub- 
ject by their wealth. There is, after all, some sense in 
a property qualification. The man who is dependent on a 
master for his living is not a free man. To give the 
suffrage to slaves is only to give votes to their owners. 
That universal suffrage may add to, instead of decreasing, 
the political power of wealth we see when mill-owners and 
mine operators vote their hands. The freedom to earn, 
without fear or favor, a comfortable living, ought to go 
with the freedom to vote. Thus alone can a sound basis 
for republican institutions be secured. How can a man 
be said to have a country where he has no right to a square 
inch of soil ; where he has nothing but his hands, and, 
urged by starvation, must bid against his fellows for the 
privilege of using them ? When it comes to voting tramps, 
some principle has been carried to a ridiculous and dan- 
gerous extreme. I have known elections to be decided by 



16 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

tlie carting of paupers from the almshouse to the polls. 
But such decisions can scarcely be in the interest of good 
government. 

Beneath all political problems lies the social problem 
N-of the distribution of wealth. This our people do not 
generally recognize, and they listen to quacks who propose 
to cure the symptoms without touching the disease. " Let 
us elect good men to office," say the quacks. Yes ; let us 
catch little bn^ds by sprinkling salt on their tails ! 

It behooves us to look facts in the face. The experiment 
of popular government in the United States is clearly a 
faOure. Not that it is a failure everywhere and in every- 
thing. An experiment of this kind does not have to be 
fully worked out to be proved a failure. But speaking 
generally of the whole country, from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, our government 
by the people has in large degree become, is in larger 
degree becoming, government by the strong and unscru- 
pulous. 

The people, of course, continue to vote ; but the peo- 
ple are losing their power. Money and organization tell 
more and more in elections. In some sections bribery 
has become chronic, and nimibers of voters expect regu- 
larly to sell their votes. In some sections large employers 
regularly buUdoze their hands into voting as they wish. 
In municipal. State and Federal politics the power of the 
''machine" is increasing. In many places it has become 
so strong that the ordinary citizen has no more influence 
in the government under which he lives than he would 
have in China. He is, in reality, not one of the governing 
classes, but one of the governed. He occasionally, in dis- 
gust, votes for " the other man," or " the other party ; " 
but, generally, to find that he has effected only a change 
of masters, or secured the same masters under different 
names. And he is beginning to accept the situation, and 



POLITICAL DANGERS. 17 

to leave politics to politicians, as sometMng with which 
an honest, seK-respecting man cannot afford to meddle. 

We are steadily differentiating a governing class, or 
r;ither a class of Pretorians, who make a business of gaining 
political power and then selling it. The type of the rising 
party leader is not the orator or statesman of an earlier 
day, but the shrewd manager, who knows how to handle 
the workers, how to combine pecuniary interests, how to 
obtain money and to spend it, how to gather to himself 
followers and to secure their allegiance. One party 
machine is becoming complementary to the other party 
machine, the politicians, hke the railroad managers, having 
discovered that combination pays better than competition. 
So rings are made impregnable and great pecuniary 
interests secure their ends no matter how elections go. 
There are sovereign States so completely in the hands of 
rings and corporations that it seems as if nothing short of 
a revolutionary uprising of the people could dispossess 
them. Indeed, whether the General Government has not 
ah-eady passed beyond popular control may be doubted. 
Certain it is that possession of the General Government 
has for some time past secured possession. And for one 
term, at least, the Presidential chair has been occupied by 
a man not elected to it. This, of course, was largely due 
to the crookedness of the man who was elected, and to 
the lack of principle in his supporters. Nevertheless, it 
occurred. 

As for the great railroad managers, they may well say, 
"The people be d— d!" When they want the power of 
the people they buy the people's masters. The map of the 
United States is colored to show States and Territories. 
A map of real political powers would ignore State lines. 
Here would be a big patch representing the domains of 
Vanderbilt ; there Jay Gould's dominions would be brightly 
marked. In another place would be set off the empire of 



18 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

Stanford and Huntington ; in another the newer empire 
of Henry Villard. The States and parts of States that own 
the sway of the Pennsylvania Central would be distin- 
guished from those ruled by the Baltimore and Ohio ; and 
so on. In our National Senate, sovereign members of the 
Union are supposed to be represented ; but what are more 
truly represented are railroad kings and great moneyed 
interests, though occasionally a mine jobber from Nevada 
or Colorado, not inimical to the ruling powers, is suffered 
to buy himself a seat for glory. And the Bench as well 
as the Senate is being filled with corporation henchmen, 
A railroad king makes his attorney a judge of last resort, 
as the great lord used to make his chaplain a bishop. 

We do not get even cheap government. We might 
keep a royal family, house them in palaces like Versailles 
or Sans Souci, provide them with courts and guards, 
masters of robes and rangers of parks, let them give balls 
more costly than Mrs. Vanderbilt's, and build yachts finer 
than Jay Gould's, for much less than is wasted and stolen 
under our nominal government of the people. What a 
noble income would be that of a Duke of New York, a 
Marquis of Philadelphia, or a Count of San Francisco, who 
would administer the government of these municipalities 
for fifty per cent, of present waste and stealage ! Unless 
we got an esthetic Chinook, where could we get an absolute 
ruler who would erect such a monument of extravagant 
vulgarity as the new Capitol of the State of New York ? 
While, as we saw in the Congress just adjourned, the 
benevolent gentlemen whose desire it is to protect us 
against the pauper labor of Europe quarrel over their 
respective shares of the spoil with as little regard for the 
taxpayer as a pirate crew would have for the consignees 
of a captured vessel. 

The people are largely conscious of all this, and there 
is among the masses much dissatisfaction. But there is a 



POLITICAL DANGERS. 19 

lack of that intelligent interest necessary to adapt political 
organization to changing conditions. The popular idea 
of reform seems to be merely a change of men or a change 
of parties, not a change of system. Political children, we 
attribute to bad men or wicked parties what really springs 
from deep general causes. Our two great poKtical parties 
have really nothing more to propose than the keeping or 
the taking of the offices from the other party. On their 
outskirts are the Greenbackers, who, with a more or less 
definite idea of what they want to do with the currency, 
represent vague social dissatisfaction; civil service re- 
formers, who hope to accomplish a political reform while 
keeping it out of pohtics ; and anti-monopolists, who pro- 
pose to tie up locomotives with packthread. Even the 
labor organizations seem to fear to go further in their 
platforms than some such propositions as eight-hour laws, 
bureaus of labor statistics, mechanics' liens, and prohibition 
of prison contracts. 

All this shows want of grasp and timidity of thought. 
It is not by accident that government grows corrupt 
and passes out of the hands of the people. If we would 
really make and continue this a government of the people, 
for the people and by the people, we must give to our 
politics earnest attention ; we must be prepared to review 
our opinions, to give up old ideas and to accept new ones. 
We must abandon prejudice, and make our reckoning with 
free minds. The sailor, who, no matter how the wind 
might change, should persist in keeping his vessel under 
the same sail and on the same tack, would never reach his 
haven. 



CHAPTER III. 

COMING INCEEASE OF SOCIAL PRESSUEE. 

THE trees, as I write, have not yet begun to leaf, nor 
even the blossoms to appear ; yet, passing down the 
lower part of Broadway these early days of spring, one 
breasts a steady current of uncouthly dressed men and 
women, carrying bundles and boxes and all manner of 
baggage. As the season advances, the human current will 
increase ; even in winter it will not whoUy cease its flow. 
It is the great gulf-stream of humanity which sets from 
Europe upon America— the greatest migration of peoples 
since the world began. Other minor branches has the 
stream. Into Boston and Philadelphia, into Portland, 
Quebec and Montreal, into New Orleans, Galveston, San 
Francisco and Victoria, come offshoots of the same current ; 
and as it flows it draws increasing volume from wider 
sources. Emigration to America has, since 1848, reduced 
the population of Ireland by more than a third ; but as 
Irish ability to feed the stream declines, English emigra- 
tion increases ; the German outpour becomes so vast as to 
assume the first proportions, and the millions of Italy, 
pressed by want as severe as that of Ireland, begin to turn 
to the emigrant ship as did the Irish. In Castle Garden 
one may see the garb and hear the speech of all European 
peoples. From the fiords of Norway, from the plains of 
Russia and Hungary, from the mountains of Wallachia, 
and from Mediterranean shores and islands, once the center 



COMING INCREASE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE. 21 

of classic civilization, the great current is fed. Every year 
increases the facility of its flow. Year by year improve- 
ments in steam navigation are practically reducing the 
distance between the two continents ; year by year Euro- 
pean railroads are making it easier for interior populations 
to reach the seaboard, and the telegraph, the newspaper, 
the schoolmaster and the cheap post are lessening those 
objections of ignorance and sentiment to removal that are 
so strong with people long rooted in one pla,ce. Yet, in 
spite of this great exodus, the population of Europe, as a 
whole, is steadily increasing. 

And across the continent, from east to west, from the 
older to the newer States, an even greater migration is 
going on. Our people emigrate more readily than those 
of Europe, and increasing as European immigration is, it 
is yet becoming a less and less important factor of our 
growth, as compared with the natural increase of our 
population. At Chicago and St. Paul, Omaha and Kansas 
City, the volume of the westward-moving current has 
increased, not diminished. From what, so short a time 
ago, was the new "West of unbroken prairie and native 
forest, goes on, as children grow up, a constant migration 
to a newer West. 

This westward expansion of population has gone on 
steadily since the first settlement of the Eastern shore. It 
has been the great distinguishing feature in the conditions 
of our people. Without its possibility we would have been 
in nothing what we are. Our higher standard of wages 
and of comfort and of average intelligence, our superior 
self-reliance, energy, inventiveness, adaptability and as- 
similative power, spring as directly from this possibility 
of expansion as does our unprecedented growth. All that 
we are proud of in national life and national character 
comes primarity from our background of unused land. 
We are but transplanted Europeans, and, for that matter, 



22 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

mostly of tlie "inferior classes." It is not usually those 
whose position is comfortable and whose prospects are 
bright who emigrate; it is those who are pinched and 
dissatisfied, those to whom no prospect seems open. There 
are heralds' colleges in Europe that drive a good business 
in providing a certain class of Americans with pedigrees 
and coats of arms ; but it is probably well for this sort of 
self-esteem that the majority of us cannot truly trace our 
ancestry very far. We had some Pilgrim Fathers, it is 
true; likewise some Quaker fathers, and other sorts of 
fathers ; yet the majority even of the early settlers did not 
come to America for "freedom to worship God," but 
because they were poor, dissatisfied, unsuccessful, or 
recklessly adventurous — many because they were evicted, 
many to escape imprisonment, many because they were 
kidnapped, many as self-sold bondsmen, as indentured 
apprentices, or mercenary soldiers. It is the virtue of new 
soil, the freedom of opportunity given by the possibility 
of expansion, that has here transmuted into wholesome 
human growth material that, had it remained in Europe, 
might have been degraded and dangerous, just as in 
Australia the same conditions have made respected and 
self-respecting citizens out of the descendants of convicts, 
and even out of convicts themselves. 

It may be doubted if the relation of the opening of the 
New World to the development of modern civilization is 
yet fully recognized. In many respects the discovery of 
Columbus has proved the most important event in the 
history of the European world since the birth of Christ. 
How important America has been to Europe as furnish- 
ing an outlet for the restless, the dissatisfied, the oppressed 
and the downtrodden ; how influences emanating from the 
freer opportunities and freer life of America have reacted 
upon European thought and life— we can begin to realize 
only when we try to imagine what would have been the 



COMING INCREASE OF SOCIAL PRESSUEE. 23 

present condition of Europe had Columbus found only a 
watery waste between Europe and Asia, or even had he 
found here a continent populated as India, or China, or 
Mexico, were populated. 

And, correlatively, one of the most momentous events 
that could happen to the modem world would be the ending 
of this possibility of westward expansion. That it must 
sometime end is evident when we remember that the earth 
is round. 

Practically, this event is near at hand. Its shadow is 
even now stealing over us. Not that there is any danger 
of this continent being reaUy overpopulated. Not that 
there will not be for a long time to come, even at our 
present rate of growth, plenty of unused land or of land 
only partially used. But to feel the results of what is 
called pressure of population, to realize here pressure of 
the same kind that forces European emigration upon our 
shores, we shall not have to wait for that. Europe to-day 
is not overpopulated. In Ireland, whence we have received 
such an immense immigration, not one-sixth of the soil is 
under cultivation, and grass grows and beasts feed where 
once were populous villages. In Scotland there is the 
solitude of the deer forest and the grouse moor where a 
century ago were homes of men. One may ride on the 
railways through the richest agricultural districts of 
England and see scarcely as many houses as in the valley 
of the Platte, where the buffalo herded a few years back. 

Twelve months ago, when the hedges were blooming, I 
passed along a lovely English road near by the cottage of 
that " Shepherd of Salisbury Plain " of whom I read, when 
a boy, in a tract which is a good sample of the husks 
frequently given to children as rehgious food, and which 
is still, I presume, distributed by the American, as it is by 
the English, Tract Society. On one side of the road was 
a wide expanse of rich land, in which no plowshare had 



24 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

that season been struck, because its owner demanded a 
higher rent than the farmers would give. On the other, 
stretched, for many a broad acre, a lordly park, its velvety 
verdure untrodden save by a few light-footed deer. And, 
as we passed along, my companion, a native of those parts, 
bitterly complained that, since this lord of the manor had 
inclosed the little village green and set out his fences to 
take in the grass of the roadside, the cottagers could not 
keep even a goose, and the children of the village had no 
place to play ! Place there was in plenty, but, so far as 
the children were concerned, it might as well be in Africa 
or in the moon. And so in our Far West, I have seen 
emigrants toiling painfully for long distances through 
vacant land without finding a spot on which they dared 
settle. In a country where the springs and streams are 
all inclosed by walls he cannot scale, the wayfarer, but for 
charity, might perish of thirst, as in a desert. There is 
plenty of vacant land on Manhattan Island. But on 
Manhattan Island human beings are packed closer than 
anywhere else in the world. There is plenty of fresh air 
all around — one man owns forty acres of it, a whiff of 
which he never breathes, since his home is on his yacht in 
European waters ; but, for all that, thousands of children 
die in New York every summer for want of it, and thou- 
sands more would die did not charitable people subscribe 
to fresh-air funds. The social pressure which forces on 
our shores this swelling tide of immigration arises not 
from the fact that the land of Europe is all in use, but 
that it is aU appropriated. That wiU soon be our case as 
weU. Our land will not all be used; but it will all be 
" fenced in." 

We still talk of our vast public domain, and figures 
showing millions and millions of acres of unappropriated 
public land yet swell grandly in the reports of our Land 
Office. But already it is so difficult to find public land fit 



COMING INCEEASE OF SOCIAL PEESSUEE. 25 

for settlement, tliat the great majority of those wishing to 
settle find it cheaper to buy, and rents in California and 
the New Northwest run from a quarter to even one-half 
the crop. It must be remembered that the area which yet 
figures in the returns of our pubhc domain includes all the 
great mountain chains, all the vast deserts and dry plains 
fit only for grazing, or not even for that; it must be 
remembered that of what is really fertile, millions and 
millions of acres are covered by railroad grants as yet 
unpatented, or what amounts to the same thing to the 
settler, are shadowed by them; that much is held by 
appropriation of the water, without which it is useless; 
and that much more is held under claims of various kinds, 
which, whether legal or illegal, are sufficient to keep the 
settler off unless he will consent to pay a price, or to 
mortgage his labor for years. 

Nevertheless, land with us is still comparatively cheap. 
But this cannot long continue. The stream of immigra- 
tion that comes swelling in, added to our steadily aug- 
menting natural increase, will soon now so occupy the 
available lands as to raise the price of the poorest land 
worth settling on to a point we have never known. Nearly 
twenty years ago Mr. Wade, of Ohio, in a speech in the 
United States Senate, predicted that b}?- the close of the 
century every acre of good agricultural land in the Union 
would be worth at least $50. That his prediction will be 
even more than verified we may already see. By the close 
of the century our population, at the normal rate of 
increase, will be over forty millions more than in 1880. 
That is to say, within the next seventeen years an addi- 
tional population greater than that of the whole United 
States at the close of the civil war will be demanding room. 
Where will they find cheap land? There is no farther 
West. Our advance has reached the Pacific, and beyond 
the Pacific is the East, with its teeming millions. From 



26 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

San Diego to Puget Sound there is no valley of the coasts 
line that is not settled or preempted. To the very farthest 
corners of the Republic settlers Ure already going. The 
pressure is already so great that speculation and settlement 
are beginning to cross the northern border into Canada 
and the southern border into Mexico ; so great that land 
is being settled and is becoming valuable that a few years 
ago would have been rejected— land where winter lasts 
for six months and the thermometer goes down into the 
forties below zero; land where, owing to insufficient 
rainfall, a crop is always a risk; land that cannot be cul- 
tivated at aU without irrigation. The vast spaces of the 
western half of the continent do not contain anything like 
the proportion of arable land that does the eastern. The 
"great American desert" yet exists, though not now 
marked upon our maps. There is not to-day remaining 
in the United States any considerable body of good lan(^ 
unsettled and unclaimed, upon which settlers can go with 
the prospect of finding a homestead on government 
terms. Already the tide of settlement presses angrily 
upon the Indian reservations, and but for the power of 
the General Government would sweep over them. Already, 
although her population is as yet but a fraction more than 
six to the square mile, the last acre of the vast public 
domain of Texas has passed into private hands, the rush 
to purchase during the past year having been such that 
many thousands of acres more than the State had were 
sold. 

"We may see what is coming by the avidity with which 
capitalists, and especially foreign capitalists, who realize 
what is the value of land where none is left over which 
population may freely spread, are purchasing land in the 
United States. This movement has been going on quietly 
for some years, until now there is scarcely a rich English 
peer or wealthy English banker who does not, either 



COMING INCREASE OF SOCIAL PEESSURE. 27 

individually or as the member of some syndicate, own a 
great tract of our new land, and the purchase of large 
bodies for foreign account is going on every day. It is 
with these absentee landlords that our coming millions 
must make terms. 

Nor must it be forgotten that, while our population is 
increasing, and our *' wild lands " are being appropriated, 
the productive capacity of our soil is being steadily re- 
duced, which, practically, amounts to the same thing as 
reducing its quantity. Speaking generally, the agriculture 
of the United States is an exhaustive agriculture. We do 
not return to the earth what we take from it ; each crop 
that is harvested leaves the soil the poorer. We are cut- 
ting down forests which we do not replant ; we are shipping 
abroad, in wheat and cotton and tobacco and meat, or 
flushing into the sea through the sewers of our great cities, 
the elements of fertility that have been embedded in the 
soil by the slow processes of nature, acting for long ages. 

The day is near at hand when it will be no longer pos- 
sible for our increasing population freely to expand over 
new land ; when we shall need for our own millions the 
immense surplus of food-stuffs now exported; when we 
shall not only begin to feel that social pressure which 
comes when natural resources are all monopolized, but 
when increasing social pressure here will increase social 
pressure in Europe. How momentous is this fact we 
begin to realize when we cast about for such another outlet 
as the United States has furnished. We look in vain. 
The British possessions to the north of us embrace com- 
paratively little arable land ; the valleys of the Saskatche- 
wan and the Red River are being already taken up, and 
land speculation is already raging there in fever. Mexico 
offers opportunities for American enterprise and American 
capital and American trade, but scarcely for American 
emigration. There is some room for our settlers in that 



28 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

northern zone that has been kept desolate by fierce Indians ; 
but it is very little. The table-land of Mexico and those 
portions of Central and South America suited to our people 
are already well filled by a population whom we cannot 
displace unless, as the Saxons displaced the ancient Britons, 
by a war of extermination. Anglo-Saxon capital and 
enterprise and influence will doubtless dominate those 
regions, and many of our people will go there ; but it will 
be as Englishmen go to India or British Guiana. Where 
land is already granted and where peon labor can be had 
for a song, no such emigration can take place as that 
which has been pushing its way westward over the United 
States. So of Africa. Our race has made a permanent 
lodgment on the southern extremity of that vast continent, 
but its northern advance is met by tropical heats and the 
presence of races of strong vitality. On the north, the 
Latin branches of the European family seem to have again 
become acclimated, and will probably in time revive the 
ancient populousness and importance of Mediterranean, 
Africa ; but it will scarcely f ui'nish an outlet for more than 
them. As for Equatorial Afiica, though we may explore 
and civilize and develop, we cannot colonize it in the face 
of the climate and of races that increase rather than dis- 
appear in presence of the white man. The arable land of 
Australia would not merely be soon well populated by 
anything like the emigration that Europe is pouring on 
America, but there the forestalling of land goes on as 
rapidly as here. Thus we come again to that greatest of 
the continents, from which our race once started on its 
westward way, Asia — mother of peoples and religions — 
which yet contains the greater part of the human race — 
millions who live and die in all but utter unconsciousness 
of our modern world. In the awakening of those peoples 
by the impact of "Western civilization lies one of the greatest 
problems of the future. 



COMINa INCEEASE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE. 29 

But it is not my purpose to enter into such speculations. 
What I want to point out is that we are very soon to lose 
one of the most important conditions under which our 
civilization has been developing— that possibility of ex- 
pansion over virgin soil that has given scope and freedom 
to American life, and relieved social pressure in the most 
progressive European nations. Tendencies, harmless 
under this condition, may become most dangerous when 
it is changed. Gunpowder does not explode until it is 
confined. You may rest your hand on the slowly ascending 
jaw of a hydraulic press. It will only gently raise it. But 
wait a moment till it meets resistance ! 



CHAPTER IV. 

TWO OPPOSING TENDENCIES. 

SO mucli freer, so mucli higher, so much fuller and 
wider is the life of our time, that, looking back, we 
cannot help feeling something like pity, if not contempt, 
for preceding generations. 

Comforts, conveniences, luxuries, that a little while ago 
wealth could not purchase, are now matters of ordinary- 
use. We travel in an hour, easily and comfortably, what 
to our fathers was a hard day's journey; we send in 
minutes messages that, in their time, would have taken 
weeks. We are better acquainted with remote countries 
than they with regions little distant ; we know as common 
things what to them were fast-locked secrets of nature; 
our world is larger, our horizon is wider ; in the years of 
our lives we may see more, do more, learn more. 

Consider the diffusion of knowledge, the quickened 
transmission of intelligence. Compare the school-books 
used by our children with the school-books used by our 
fathers ; see how cheap printing has brought within the 
reach of the masses the very treasures of literature; how 
enormously it has widened the audience of the novelist, 
the historian, the essayist and the poet ; see how superior 
are even the trashy novels and story-papers in which 
shop-girls delight, to the rude ballads and "last dying 
speeches and confessions," which were their prototypes. 



TWO OPPOSING TENDENCIES. 31 

Look at the daily newspapers, read even by the poorest, 
and giving to them glimpses of the doings of all classes of 
society, news from all parts of the world. Consider the 
illustrated journals that every week bring to the million 
pictures of life in all phases and in all countries— bird's- 
eye views of cities, of grand and beautiful landscapes ; the 
features of noted men and women ; the sittings of parlia- 
ments, and congresses, and conventions ; the splendor of 
courts, and the wild life of savages; triumphs of art; 
glories of architecture; processes of industry; achieve- 
ments of inventive skill. Such a panorama as thus, week 
after week, passes before the eyes of common men and 
women, the richest and most powerful could not a genera- 
tion ago have commanded. 

These things, and the many other things that the mention 
of these will suggest, are necessarily exerting a powerful 
influence upon thought and feehng. Superstitions are 
dying out, prejudices are giving way, manners and customs 
are becoming assimilated, sympathies are widening, new 
aspirations are quickening the masses. 

We come into the world with minds ready to receive 
any impression. To the eyes of infancy all is new, and 
one thing is no more wonderful than another. In whatever 
lies beyond common experience we assume the beliefs of 
those about us, and it is only the strongest intellects that 
can in a little raise themselves above the accepted opinions 
of their times. In a community where that opinion pre- 
vailed, the vast majority of us would as unhesitatingly 
believe that the earth is a plain, supported by a gigantic 
elephant, as we now believe it a sphere circling round the 
sun. No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no 
superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has 
become embedded in common belief. Men will submit 
themselves to tortures and to death, mothers will immolate 
their children, at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept. 



32 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

What more unnatural tlian polygamy ? Yet see how long 
and how widely polygamy has existed ! 

In this tendency to accept what we find, to believe what 
we are told, is at once good and evil. It is this which 
makes social advance possible ; it is this which makes it so 
slow and painful. Each generation thus obtains without 
effort the hard- won knowledge bequeathed to it ; it is thus, 
also, enslaved by errors and perversions which it in the 
same way receives. 

It is thus that tyranny is maintained and superstition 
perpetuated. Polygamy is unnatural. Obvious facts of 
universal experience prove this. The uniform proportion 
in which the sexes are brought into the world ; the exelu- 
siveness of the feeling with which in healthy conditions 
they attract each other; the necessities imposed by the 
slow growth and development of children, point to the 
union of one man with one woman as the intent of Nature. 
Yet, although it is repugnant to the most obvious facts 
and to the strongest instincts, polygamy seems a perfectly 
natural thing to those educated in a society where it has 
become an accepted institution, and it is only by long effort 
and much struggling that this idea can be eradicated. So 
with slavery. Even to such minds as those of Plato and 
Aristotle, to own a man seemed as natural as to own a 
horse. Even in this nineteenth century and in this ^' land 
of liberty," how long has it been since those who denied 
the right of property in human flesh and blood were 
denounced as "communists," as "infidels," as "incendi- 
aries," bent on uprooting social order and destroying all 
property rights ? So with monarchy, so with aristocracy, 
so with many other things as unnatural that are still 
unquestioningly accepted. Can anything be more unnat- 
ural—that is to say, more repugnant to right reason and 
to the facts and laws of nature— than that those who work 
least should get most of the things that work produces ? 



TWO OPPOSINa TENDENCIES; 33 

" He that will not work, neither shall he" eat." That is 
not merely the word of the Apostle ; it is the obvious law 
of Nature. Yet all over the world, hard and poor is the 
fare of the toiling masses ; while those who aid production 
neither with hand nor with head live luxuriously and fare 
sumptuously. This we have been used to, and it has 
therefore seemed to us natural ; just as polygamy, slavery, 
aristocracy and monarchy seem natural to those accus- 
tomed to them. 

But mental habits which made this state of things seem 
natural are breaking up ; superstitions which prevented 
its being questioned are melting away. The revelations 
of physical science, the increased knowledge of other times 
and other peoples, the extension of education, emigration, 
travel, the rise of the critical spirit and the changes in 
old methods everywhere going on, are destroying beliefs 
which made the masses of men content with the position 
of hewers of wood and drawers of water, are softening 
manners and widening sympathies, are extending the idea 
of human equality and brotherhood. 

All over the world the masses of men are becoming 
more and more dissatisfied with conditions under which 
their fathers would have been contented. It is in vain 
that they are told that their situation has been much 
improved ; it is in vain that it is pointed out to them that 
comforts, amusements, opportunities, are within their reach 
that their fathers would not have dreamed of. The having 
got so much, only leads them to ask why they should not 
have more. Desire grows by what it feeds on. Man is 
not like the ox. He has no fixed standard of satisfaction. 
To arouse his ambition, to educate him to new wants, is 
as certain to make him discontented with his lot as to 
make that lot harder. We resign ourselves to what we 
think cannot be bettered; but when we realize that 
improvement is possible, then we become restive. This 



34 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

is the explanation of tlie paradox that De Tocqueville 
thought astonishing : that the masses find their position 
the more intolerable the more it is improved. The slave 
codes were wise that prescribed pains and penalties for 
teaching bondsmen to read, and they reasoned well who 
opposed popular education on the ground that it would 
bring revolution. 

But there is in the conditions of the civilized world 
to-day something more portentous than a growing restive- 
ness under evils long endured. Everything tends to 
awake the sense of natural equahty, to arouse the aspi- 
rations and ambitions of the masses, to excite a keener 
and keener perception of the gross injustice of existing 
inequalities of privilege and wealth. Yet, at the same 
time, everything tends to the rapid and monstrous increase 
of these inequalities. Never since great estates were eating 
out the heart of Rome has the world seen such enormous 
fortunes as are now arising — and never more utter pro- 
letarians. In the paper which contained a many-column 
account of the Vanderbilt ball, with its gorgeous dresses 
and its wealth of diamonds, with its profusion of roses, 
costing $2 each, and its precious wines flowing like water, 
I also read a brief item telling how, at a station-house near 
by, thirty-nine persons— eighteen of them women— had 
sought shelter, and how they were all marched into court 
next morning and sent for six months to prison. " The 
women," said the item, "shrieked and sobbed bitterly as 
they were carried to prison." Christ was born of a woman. 
And to Mary Magdalen he turned in tender blessing. But 
such vermin have some of these human creatures, made 
in God's image, become, that we must shovel them off to 
prison without being too particular. 

The railroad is a new thing. It has scarcely begun its 
work. Yet it has already differentiated the man who 
counts his income by millions every month, and the 



TWO opposma tendencies. 35 

thousands of men glad to work for him at from 90 cents 
to $1.50 a day. Who shall set bounds, under present 
tendencies, to the great fortunes of the next generation ? 
Or to the correlatives of these great fortunes, the tramps 1 

The tendency of all the inventions and improvements 
so wonderfully augmenting productive power is to con- 
centrate enormous wealth in the hands of a few, to make 
the condition of the many more hopeless ; to force into the 
position of machines for the production of wealth they 
are not to enjoy, men whose aspirations are being aroused. 
Without a single exception that I can think of, the effect 
of all modern industrial improvements is to production 
upon a large scale, to the minute division of labor, to the 
giving to the possession of large capital an overpowering 
advantage. Even such inventions as the telephone and 
the typewriter tend to the concentration of wealth, by 
adding to the ease with which large businesses can be 
managed, and lessening limitations that after a certain 
point made further extension more difficult. 

The tendency of the machine is in everything not merely 
to place it out of the power of the workman to become his 
own employer, but to reduce him to the position of a mere 
attendant or feeder ; to dispense with judgment, skill and 
brains, save in a few overseers ; to reduce all others to the 
monotonous work of automatons, to which there is no 
future save the same unvarying round. 

Under the old system of handicraft, the workman may 
have toiled hard and long, but in his work he had com- 
panionship, variety, the pleasure that comes of the exercise 
of creative skill, the sense of seeing things growing under 
his hand to finished form. He worked in his own home 
or side by side with his employer. Labor was lightened 
by emulation, by gossip, by laughter, by discussion. As 
apprentice, he looked forward to becoming a journe5rman ; 
as a journeyman, he looked forward to becoming a master 



36 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

and taking an apprentice of his own. With a few tools 
and a little raw material he was independent. He dealt 
directly with those who used the finished articles he pro- 
duced. If he could not find a market for money he could 
find a market in exchange. That terrible dread— the 
dread of having the opportunities of livelihood shut off ; 
of finding himself utterly helpless to provide for his family 
—never cast its shadow over him. 

Consider the blacksmith of the industrial era now every- 
where passing— or rather the " black and white smith," for 
the finished workman worked in steel as well. The smithy 
stood by roadside or street. Through its open doors were 
caught glimpses of nature ; all that was passing could be 
seen. Wayfarers stopped to inquire, neighbors to tell or 
hear the news, children to see the hot iron glow and watch 
the red sparks fly. Now the smith shoed a horse ; now he 
put on a wagon-tire ; now he forged and tempered a tool ; 
again he welded a broken andiron, or beat out with 
graceful art a crane for the deep chimney-place, or, when 
there was nothing else to do, he wrought iron into nails. 

Go now into one of those enormous establishments 
covering acres and acres, in which workmen by the thou- 
sand are massed together, and, by the aid of steam and 
machinery, iron is converted to its uses at a fraction of 
the cost of the old system. You cannot enter without 
permission from the office, for over each door you will find 
the sign, '^ Positively no admittance." If.you are permitted 
to go in, you must not talk to the workmen ; but that 
makes little difference, as amid the din and the clatter, and 
whir of belts and wheels, you could not if you would. 
Here you find men doing over and over the selfsame thing 
— passing, all day long, bars of iron through great rollers ; 
presenting plates to steel jaws; turning, amid clangor in 
which you can scarcely " hear yourself think," bits of iron 
over and back again, sixty times a minute, for hour after 



TWO OPPOSING TENDENCIES. 37 

hour, for day after day, for year after year. In the whole 
great establishment there will be not a man, save here and 
there one who got his training under the simpler system 
now passing away, who can do more than some minute 
part of what goes to the making of a salable article. The 
lad learns in a httle while how to attend his particular 
machine. Then his progress stops. He may become gray- 
headed without learning more. As his children grow, the 
only way he has of augmenting his income is by setting 
them to work. As for aspiring to become master of such 
an establishment, with its millions of capital in machinery 
and stock, he might as well aspire to be King of England 
or Pope of Rome. He has no more control over the con- 
ditions that give him employment than has the passenger 
in a railroad car over the motion of the train. Causes 
which he can neither prevent nor foresee may at any time 
stop his machine and throw him upon the world, an utterly 
unskilled laborer, unaccustomed even to swing a pick or 
handle a spade. When times are good, and his employer 
is coining money, he can only get an advance by a strike 
or a threatened strike. At the least symptoms of harder 
times his wages are scaled down, and he can only resist by a 
strike, which means, for a longer or shorter time, no wages. 
I have spoken of but one trade ; but the tendency is the 
same in all others. This is the form that industrial organi- 
zation is everywhere assuming, even in agriculture. Great 
corporations are now stocking immense ranges with cattle, 
and " bonanza farms " are cultivated by gangs of nomads 
destitute of anything that can be called home. In all 
occupations the workman is steadily becoming divorced 
from the tools and opportunities of labor ; everywhere the 
inequalities of fortune are becoming more glaring. And 
this at a time when thought is being quickened ; when the 
old forces of conservatism are giving way ; when the idea 
of human equality is growing and spreading. 



38 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

When between those who work and want and those who 
live in idle luxury there is so great a gulf fixed that in 
popular imagination they seem to belong to distinct orders 
of beings ; when, in the name of religion, it is persistently 
instilled into the masses that all things in this world are 
ordered by Divine Providence, which appoints to each his 
place ; when children are taught from the earliest infancy 
that it is, to use the words of the Episcopal catechism, 
their duty toward God and man to "honor and obey the 
civil authority," to " order themselves lowly and reverently 
to all their betters, and to do their duty in that state of life 
unto which it shall please God to call them ; " when these 
counsels of humility, of contentment and of self-abasement 
are enforced by the terrible threat of an eternity of torture, 
while on the other hand the poor are taught to believe 
that if they patiently bear their lot here God will after 
death translate them to a heaven where there is no private 
property and no poverty, the most glaring inequahties in 
condition may excite neither envy nor indignation. 

But the ideas that are stirring in the world to-day are 
dijfferent from these. 

Near nineteen hundred years ago, when another civili- 
zation was developing monstrous inequalities, when the 
masses everywhere were being ground into hopeless 
slavery, there arose in a Jewish village an unlearned 
carpenter, who, scorning the orthodoxies and ritualisms of 
the time, preached to laborers and fishermen the gospel 
of the fatherhood of God, of the equality and brotherhood 
of men, who taught his disciples to pray for the coming of 
the kingdom of heaven on earth. The college professors 
sneered at him, the orthodox preachers denounced him. 
He was reviled as a dreamer, as a disturber, as a "com- 
munist," and, finally, organized society took the alarm, 
and he was crucified between two thieves. But the word 
went forth, and, spread by fugitives and slaves, made its 



TWO OPPOSING TENDENCIES. 39 

way against power and against persecution till it revolu- 
tionized the world, and ont of the rotting old civilization 
brought the germ of the new. Then the privileged classes 
rallied again, carved the effigy of the man of the people 
in the courts and on the tombs of kings, in his name 
consecrated inequality, and wrested his gospel to the 
defense of social injustice. But again the same great 
ideas of a common fatherhood, of a common brotherhood, 
of a social state in which none shall be overworked and 
none shall want, begin to quicken in common thought. 

When a mighty wind meets a strong current, it does 
not portend a smooth sea. And whoever will think of 
the opposing tendencies beginning to develop will appre- 
ciate the gravity of the social problems the civilized world 
must soon meet. He will also understand the meaning of 
Christ's words when he said : 

'' Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came 
not to send peace, hut a sword." 



CHAPTER V. 

THE MARCH OF CONCENTRATION. 

IN 1790, at the time of the first census of the United 
States, the cities contained but 3.3 per cent, of the 
whole population. In 1880 the cities contained 22.5 per 
cent, of the population. This tendency of population to 
concentrate is one of the marked features of our time. 
All over the civilized world the great cities are growing 
even faster than the growth of population. The increase 
in the population of England and Scotland during the 
present century has been in the cities. In France, where 
population is nearly stationary, the large cities are year 
by year becoming larger. In Ireland, where population 
is steadily declining, Dublin and Belfast are steadily 
growing. 

The same great agencies— steam and machinery— that 
are thus massing population in cities are operating even 
more powerfully to concentrate industry and trade. This 
is to be seen wherever the new forces have had play, and 
in every branch of industry, from such primary ones as 
agriculture, stock-raising, mining and fishing, up to those 
created by recent invention, such as railroading, tele- 
graphing, or the lighting by gas or electricity. 

It has been stated on the authority of the United States 
Census Bureau that the average size of farms is decreasing 
in the United States. This statement is inconsistent not 
only with facts obvious all over the United States, and 



THE MARCH OF CONCENTRATION. 41 

with the tendencies of agriculture in other countries, such 
as Great Britain, but it is inconsistent with the returns 
furnished by the Census Bureau itself. According to the 
" Compendium of the Tenth Census," the increase of the 
number of farms in the United States during the decade 
between 1870 and 1880 was about 50 per cent., and the 
returns in the eight classes of farms enumerated show a 
steady diminution in the smaUer-sized farms and a steady 
increase in the larger. In the class under three acres, the 
decrease during the decade was about 37 per cent, j 
between three and ten acres, about 21 per cent. ; between 
ten and twenty acres, about 14 per cent. ; between twenty 
and fifty acres, something less than 8 per cent. With the 
class between 50 and 100 acres, the increase begins, 
amounting in this class to about 37 per cent. In the next 
class, between 100 and 500 acres, the increase is nearly 
200 per cent. In the class between 500 and 1000 acres, it 
is nearly 400 per cent. In the class over 1000 acres, the 
largest given, it amounts to almost 700 per cent. 

How, in the face of these figures, the Census Bureau 
can report a decline in the average size of farms in the 
United States from 153 acres in 1870 to 134 acres in 1880 
I cannot understand. Nor is it worth while here to 
inquire.* The incontestable fact is that, like everything 
else, the ownership of land is concentrating, and farming 
is assuming a larger scale. This is due to the improve- 
ments in agricultural machinery, which make farming a 
business requiring more capital, to the enhanced value 
of land, to the changes produced by railroads, and the 
advantage which special rates give the large over the 
small producer. That it is an accelerating tendency there 
is no question. The new era in farming is only begin- 
ning. And whatever be its gains, it involves the reduction 

* For a further examination of the Census Report as to the aver- 
age size of farms, see Appendix I. 



42 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

of the great body of American farmers to the ranks of 
tenants or laborers. There are no means of discovering 
the increase of tenant farming in the United States during 
the last decade, as no returns as to tenantry were made 
prior to the last census ; but that shows that there were 
in the United States in 1880 no less than 1,024,601 tenant 
farmers. If, in addition to this, we could get at the 
number of farmers nominally owning their own land, but 
who are in reality paying rent in the shape of interest on 
mortgages, the result would be astounding. 

How in all other branches of industry the same process 
is going on, it is scarcely necessary to speak. It is 
everywhere obvious that the independent mechanic is 
becoming an operative, the little storekeeper a salesman 
in a big store, the smaU merchant a clerk or bookkeeper, 
and that men, under the old system independent, are being 
massed in the employ of great firms and corporations. 
But the effect of this is scarcely realized. A large class 
of people, including many professed public teachers, are 
constantly talking as though energy, industry and economy 
were alone necessary to business success— are constantly 
pointing to the fact that men who began with nothing are 
now rich, as proof that any one can begin with nothing 
and get rich. 

That most of our rich men did begin with nothing is 
true. But that the same success could be as easily won 
now is not true. Times of change always afford oppor- 
tunities for the rise of individuals, which disappear when 
social relations are again adjusted. "We have been not 
only overrunning a new continent, but the introduction of 
steam and the application of machinery have brought 
about industrial changes such as the world never before 
saw. 

When "William the Conqueror parceled out England 
among his followers, a feudal aristocracy was created out 



THE MARCH OF CONCENTRATION. 43 

of an army of adventurers. But when society had 
hardened again, an hereditary nobility had formed into 
which no common man could hope to win his way, and 
the descendants of William's adventurers looked down 
upon men of their fathers' class as upon beings formed of 
inferior clay. So when a new country is rapidly settling, 
those who come while land is cheap and industry and 
trade are in process of organization have opportunities 
that those who start from the same plane when land has 
become valuable and society has formed cannot have. 

The rich men of the first generation in a new country 
are always men who started with nothing, but the rich 
men of subsequent generations are generally those who 
inherited their start. In the United States, when we 
hear of a wealthy man, we naturally ask, "How did he 
make his money ? " for the presumption, over the greater 
part of the country, is that he acquired it himself. In 
England they do not ordinarily ask that question— there 
the presumption is that he inherited it. But, though the 
soil of England was parceled out long ago, the great 
changes consequent upon the introduction of steam and 
machinery have there, as here, opened opportunities to rise 
from the ranks of labor to great wealth. Those oppor- 
tunities are now closed or closing. When a railroad train 
is slowly moving off, a single step may put one on it. 
But in a few minutes those who have not taken that step 
may run themselves out of breath in the hopeless endeavor 
to overtake the train. It is absurd to think that it is easy 
to step aboard a train at fuU speed because those who got 
on board at starting did so easily. So is it absurd to 
think that opportunities open when steam and machinery 
were beginning their concentrating work will remain open. 

An English friend, a wealthy retired Manchester manu- 
facturer, once told me the story of his life. How he went 
to work at eight years of age helping make twine, when 



44 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

twine was made entirely by hand. How, when a young 
man, he walked to Manchester, and having got credit for 
a bale of flax, made it into twine and sold it. How, 
building up a little trade, he got others to work for him. 
How, when machinery began to be invented and steam 
was introduced, he took advantage of them, until he had 
a big factory and made a fortune, when he withdrew to 
spend the rest of his days at ease, leaving his business to 
his son. 

" Supposing you were a young man now," said I, " could 
you walk into Manchester and do that again ? " 

"No," replied he ; " no one could. I couldn't with fifty 
thousand pounds in place of my five shillings." 

So in every branch of business in which the new 
agencies have begun to reach anything like development. 
Leland Stanford drove an ox-team to California; Henry 
Villard came here from Germany a poor boy, became a 
newspaper reporter, and rode a mule from Kansas City to 
Denver when the plains were swarming with Indians— a 
thing no one with a bank-account would do. Stanford 
and his associates got hold of the Central Pacific enter- 
prise, with its government endowments, and are now 
masters of something like twelve thousand miles of rail, 
millions of acres of land, steamship lines, express com- 
panies, banks and newspapers, to say nothing of legisla- 
tures, congressmen, judges, etc. So Henry Villard, by a 
series of fortunate accidents, which he had energy and 
tact to improve, got hold of the Oregon Steam Navigation 
combination, and of the Northern Pacific endowment, and 
has become the railroad king of the immense domain north 
of the Stanford dominions, having likewise his thousands 
of miles of road, millions of acres of land, his newspapers, 
political servitors, and literary brushers off of flies, and 
being able to bring over a shipload of lords and barons 
to see him drive a golden spike. 



THE MARCH OF CONCENTRATION. 45 

Now, it is not merely that such opportunities as these 
which have made the Stanf ords and Villards so great, come 
only with the opening of new countries and the develop- 
ment of new industrial agents ; but that the rise of the 
Staufords and Villards makes impossible the rise of others 
such as they. Whoever now starts a railroad within the 
domains of either must become subordinate and tributary 
to them. The great railroad king alone can fight the great 
railroad king, and control of the railroad system not only 
gives the railroad kings control of branch roads, of express 
companies, stage lines, steamship lines, etc., not only 
enables them to make or unmake the smaller towns, but 
it enables them to '^ size the pile " of any one who develops 
a business requiring transportation, and to transfer to 
their own pockets any surplus beyond what, after careful 
consideration, they think he ought to make. The rise of 
these great powers is like the growth of a great tree, which 
draws the moisture from the surrounding soil, and stunts 
all other vegetation by its shade. 

So, too, does concentration operate in all businesses. 
The big mill crushes out the little mill. The big store 
undersells the little store till it gets rid of its competition. 
On the top of the building of the American News Com- 
pany, on Chambers Street, New York, stands a newsboy 
carved in marble. It was in this way that the managing 
man of that great combination began. But what was at 
first the union of a few sellers of newspapers for mutual 
convenience has become such a powerful concern, that 
combination after combination, backed with capital and 
managed with skill, have gone down in the attempt to 
break or share its monopoly. The newsboy may look upon 
the statue that crowns the building as the young English- 
man who goes to India to take a clerical position may look 
upon the statue of Lord Clive. It is a lesson and an 
incentive, to be sure; but just as Clive's victories, by 



46 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

establisMng the English dominion in India, made such a 
career as his impossible again, so does the success of such 
a concern as the American News Company make it impos- 
sible for men of small capital to establish another such 
business. 

So may the printer look upon the Tribune building, or 
the newspaper writer upon that of the Herald. A Greeley 
or a Bennett could no longer hope to establish a first-class 
paper in New York, or to get control of one already 
established, unless he got a Jay Gould to back him. Even 
in our newest cities the day has gone by when a few 
printers and a few writers could combine and start a daily 
paper. To say nothing of the close corporation of the 
Associated Press, the newspaper has become an immense 
machine, requiring large capital, and for the most part it 
is written by literary operatives, who must write to suit 
the capitaUst that controls it. 

In the last generation a full-rigged Indiaman would be 
considered a very large vessel if she registered 500 tons. 
Now we are building coasting schooners of 1000 tons. It 
is not long since our first-class ocean steamers were of 
1200 or 1500 tons. Now the crack steamers of the trans- 
Atlantic route are rising to 10,000 tons. Not merely are 
there relatively fewer captains, but the chances of modern 
captains are not as good. The captain of a great trans- 
Atlantic steamer recently told me that he got no more pay 
now than when as a young man he commanded a small 
sailing-ship. Nor is there now any "primage," any 
"venture," any chance of becoming owner as well as 
captain of one of these great steamers. 

Under any condition of things short of a rigid system 
of hereditary caste, there will, of course, always be men 
who, by force of great abilities and happy accidents, win 
their way from poverty to wealth, and from low to high 
position ; but the strong tendencies of the time are to make 



THE MAECH OF CONCENTRATION. 47 

this more and more difficult. Jay Gould is probably an 
abler man than the present Vanderbilt. Had they started 
even, Vanderbilt might now have been peddKng mouse- 
traps or working for a paltry salary as some one's clerk, 
while Gould counted his scores of millions. But with all 
his money-making ability Gould cannot overcome the start 
given by the enormous acquisitions of the first Vanderbilt. 
And when the sons of the present great money-makers 
take their places, the chances of rivalry on the part of 
anybody else's sons will be much less. 

All the tendencies of the present are not merely to the 
concentration, but to the perpetuation, of great fortunes. 
There are no crusades ; the habits of the very rich are not 
to that mad extravagance that could dissipate such for- 
tunes ; high play has gone out of fashion, and the gambling 
of the Stock Exchange is more dangerous to short than to 
long purses. Stocks, bonds, mortgages, safe-deposit and 
trust companies aid the retention of large wealth, and 
aU modern agencies enlarge the sphere of its successful 
employment. 

On the other hand, the mere laborer is becoming more 
helpless, and small capitals find it more and more difficult 
to compete with larger capitals. The greater railroad 
companies are swallowing up the lesser raUroad companies ; 
one great telegraph company already controls the telegraph 
wires of the continent, and, to save the cost of buying up 
more patents, pays inventors not to invent. As in Eng- 
land, nearly aU the public houses have passed into the 
hands of the great brewers, so here, large firms start 
young men, taking chattel mortgages on their stock. As 
in Great Britain, the supplying of railway passengers 
with eatables and drinkables has passed into the hands of a 
single great company, and in Paris one large restaurateur, 
with numerous branches, is taking the trade of the smaller 
ones, so here, the boys who seU papers and peanuts on the 



48 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

trains are employees of companies, and bundles are carried 
and errands run by corporations. 

I am not denying that this tendency is largely to sub- 
serve public convenience. I am merely pointing out that 
it exists. A great change is going on all over the civilized 
world similar to that infeudation which, in Europe, during 
the rise of the feudal system, converted free proprietors 
into vassals, and brought aU society into subordination to 
a hierarchy of wealth and privilege. Whether the new 
aristocracy is hereditary or not makes little difference. 
Chance alone may determine who wiU get the few prizes 
of a lottery. But it is not the less certain that the vast 
majority of all who take part in it must draw blanks. 
The forces of the new era have not yet had time to make 
status hereditary, but we may clearly see that when the 
industrial organization compels a thousand workmen to 
take service under one master, the proportion of masters 
to men will be but as one to a thousand, though the one 
may come from the ranks of the thousand. " Master " ! 
We don't like the word. It is not American ! But what 
is the use of objecting to the word when we have the thing ? 
The man who gives me employment, which I must have 
or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I 
wiU. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE WRONG IN EXISTING SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 

THE comfortable tlieory that it is in the nature of 
things that some should be x^oor and some should 
be rich, and that the gross and constantly increasing 
inequalities in the distribution of wealth imply no fault 
in our institutions, pervades our Kterature, and is taught 
in the press, in the church, in school and in college. 

This is a free country, we are told— every man has a 
vote and every man has a chance. The laborer's son 
may become President; poor boys of to-day will be mil- 
lionaires thirty or forty years from now, and the mUlion- 
aii-e's grandchildren will probably be poor. What more 
can be asked ? If a man has energy, industry, prudence 
and foresight, he may win his way to great wealth. If he 
has not the ability to do this he must not complain of those 
who have. If some enjoy much and do little, it is because 
they, or their parents, possessed superior qualities which 
enabled them to "acquire property" or "make money." 
If others must work hard and get little, it is because they 
have not yet got their start, because they are ignorant, 
shiftless, unwilling to practise that economy necessary for 
the first accumulation of capital ; or because their fathers 
were wanting in these respects. The inequalities in con- 
dition result from the inequalities of human nature, from 
the difference in the powers and capacities of different 
men. If one has to toil ten or twelve hours a day for a 



50 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

few hundred dollars a 3^ear, while another, doing little or 
no hard work, gets an income of many thousands, it is 
because all that the former contributes to the augmentation 
of the common stock of wealth is little more than the mere 
force of his muscles. He can expect little more than the 
animal, because he brings into play little more than animal 
powers. He is but a private in the ranks of the great 
army of industry, who has but to stand still or march, as 
he is bid. The other is the organizer, the general, who 
guides and wields the whole great machine, who must 
think, plan and provide ; and his larger income is only 
commensurate with the far higher and rarer powers which 
he exercises, and the far greater importance of the func- 
tion he fulfils. Shall not education have its reward, and 
skill its payment ? What incentive would there be to the 
toil needed to learn to do anything well were great prizes 
not to be gained by those who learn to excel ? It would 
not merely be gross injustice to refuse a Raphael or a 
Rubens more than a house-painter, but it would prevent 
the development of great painters. To destroy inequalities 
in condition would be to destroy the incentive to progress. 
To quarrel with them is to quarrel with the laws of nature. 
We might as well rail against the length of the days or 
the phases of the moon ; complain that there are valleys 
a,nd mountains ; zones of tropical heat and regions of eter- 
nal ice. And were we by violent measures to diAT-de wealth 
equally, we should accomplish nothing but harm ; in a 
little while there would be inequalities as great as before. 
This, in substance, is the teaching which we constantly 
hear. It is accepted by some because it is flattering to 
their vanity, in accordance witli their interests or pleasing 
to their hope ; by others, because it is dinned into their 
ears. Like all false theories that obtain wide acceptance, 
it contains much truth. But it is truth isolated from 
other truth or alloyed with falsehood. 



THE WEONG IN EXISTING SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 51 

To try to pump out a ship with a hole in her hull would 
he hopeless j but that is not to say that leaks may not be 
stopped and ships pumped dry. It is undeniable that, 
under present conditions, inequahties in fortune would 
tend to reassert themselves even if arbitrarily leveled for 
a moment ; but that does not prove that the conditions 
from which this tendency to inequality springs may not 
be altered. Nor because there are differences in human 
qualities and powei-s does it follow that existing inequali- 
ties of fortune are thus accounted for. I have seen very 
fast compositors and very slow compositors, but the fastest 
I ever saw could not set twice as much type as the slowest, 
and I doubt if in other trades the variations are greater. 
Between normal men the difference of a sixth or seventh 
is a great difference in height — the tallest giant ever known 
was scarcely more than four times as tall as the smallest 
dwarf ever known, and I doubt if any good observer will 
say that the mental differences of men are greater than 
the physical differences. Yet we already have men hun- 
dreds of millions of times richer than other men. 

That he who produces should have, that he who saves 
should enjoy, is consistent with human reason and with 
the natural order. But existing inequalities of wealth 
cannot be justified on this ground. As a matter of fact, 
how many great fortunes can be truthfully said to have 
been fairly earned ? How many of them represent wealth 
produced by their possessors or those from whom their 
present possessors derived them ? Did there not go to the 
formation of all of them something more than superior 
industry and skill ? Such qualities may give the first start, 
but when fortunes begin to roll up into millions there will 
always be found some element of monopoly, some appro- 
priation of wealth produced by others. Often there is a 
total absence of superior industry, skill or self-denial, and 
merely better luck or greater unscrupulousness. 



52 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

An acquaintance of mine died in San Francisco recently, 
leaving $4,000,000, which will go to heirs to be looked up 
in England. I have known many men more industrious, 
more skilful, more temperate than he — men who did not 
or who will not leave a cent. This man did not get his 
wealth by his industry, skill or temperance. He no more 
produced it than did those lucky relations in England 
who may now do nothing for the rest of their lives. He 
became rich by getting hold of a piece of land in the early 
days, which, as San Francisco grew, became very valuable. 
His wealth represented not what he had earned, but what 
the monopoly of this bit of the earth's surface enabled him 
to appropriate of the earnings of others. 

A man died in Pittsburgh, the other day, leaving 
$3,000,000. He may or may not have been particularly 
industrious, skilful and economical, but it was not by 
virtue of these qualities that he got so rich. It was 
because he went to Washington and helped lobby through 
a bill which, by way of " protecting American workmen 
against the pauper labor of Europe," gave him the advan- 
tage of a sixty-per-cent. tariff. To the day of his death 
he was a stanch protectionist, and said free trade would 
ruin our 'infant industries." Evidently the $3,000,000 
which he was enabled to lay by from his own Kttle cherub 
of an "infant industry" did not represent what he had 
added to production. It was the advantage given him 
by the tariff that enabled him to scoop it up from other 
people's earnings. 

This element of monopoly, of appropriation and spoha- 
tion will, when we come to analyze them, be found largely 
to account for aU great fortunes. 

There are two classes of men who are always talking as 
though great fortunes resulted from the power of increase 
belonging to capital— those who declare that present social 
adjustments are all right | ar;d those who denounce capital 



THE WEONa IN EXISTING SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 53 

and insist that interest should be abolished. The typical 
rich man of the one set is he who, saving his earnings, 
devotes the surplus to aiding production, and becomes rich 
by the natural growth of his capital. The other set make 
calculations of the enormous sum a dollar put out at six 
per cent, compound interest will amount to in a hundred 
years, and say we must abolish interest if we would 
prevent the growth of great fortunes. 

But I think it difficult to instance any great fortune 
really due to the legitimate growth of capital obtained by 
industry. 

The great fortune of the Rothschilds springg from the 
treasure secured by the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel by 
selling his people to England to fight against our fore- 
fathers in their struggle for independence. It began in 
the blood-money received by this petty tyrant from greater 
tyrants as the price of the lives of his subjects. It has 
grown to its present enormous dimensions by the jobbing 
of loans raised by European kings for holding in subjec- 
tion the people and waging destructive wars upon each 
other. It no more represents the earnings of industry or 
of capital than do the sums now being wrung by England 
from the poverty-stricken feUahs of Egypt to pay for the 
enormous profits on loans to the Khedive, which he wasted 
on palaces, yachts, harems, ballet-dancers, and cart-loads 
of diamonds, such as he gave to the Shermans. 

The great fortune of the Duke of Westminster, the 
richest of the rich men of England, is purely the result of 
appropriation. It no more springs from the earnings of 
the present Duke of Westminster or any of his ancestors 
than did the great fortunes bestowed by Russian monarchs 
on their favorites when they gave them thousands of the 
Russian people as their serfs. An English king, long 
since dead, gave to an ancestor of the present Duke of 
Westminster a niece of land over which the city of London 



54 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

has now extended — that is to say, lie gave him the privi- 
lege, still recognized by the stupid English people, which 
enables the present duke to appropriate so much of the 
earnings of so many thousands of the present generation 
of Englishmen. 

So, too, the great fortunes of the English brewers and 
distillers have been largely built up by the operation of 
the excise in fostering monopoly and concentrating the 
business. 

Or, turning again to the United States, take the great 
fortune of the Astors. It represents for the most part a 
similar appropriation of the earnings of others, as does the 
income of the Duke of Westminster and other English 
landlords. The first Astor made an arrangement with 
certain people living in his time by virtue of which his 
children are now allowed to tax other people's children — 
to demand a very large part of their earnings from many 
thousands of the present population of New York. Its 
main element is not production or saving. No human 
being can produce land or lay up land. If the Astors had 
all remained in Grermany, or if there had never been any 
Astors, the land of Manhattan Island would have been 
here aU the same. 

Take the great Vanderbilt fortune. The first Vanderbilt 
was a boatman who earned money by hard work and saved 
it. But it was not working and saving that enabled him 
to leave such an enormous fortune. It was spoliation and 
monopoly. As soon as he got money enough he used it 
as a club to extort from others their earnings. He ran 
off opposition lines and monopolized routes of steamboat 
travel. Then he went into railroads, pursuing the same 
tactics. The Vanderbilt fortune no more comes from 
working and saving than did the fortune that Captain 
Kidd buried. 

Or take the great Gould fortune. Mr. G-ould might have 
got his first little start by superior industry and superior 



THE WEONG IN EXISTING SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 55 

self-denial. But it is not that which, has made him the 
master of a hundred millions. It was by wrecking rail- 
roads, buying judges, corrupting legislatui-es, getting up 
rings and pools and combinations to raise or depress stock 
values and transportation rates. 

So, likewise, of the great fortunes which the Pacific 
railroads have created. They have been made by lobbying 
through profligate donations of lands, bonds and subsidies, 
by the operations of Credit Mobilier and Contract and 
Finance Companies, by monopolizing and gouging. And 
so of fortunes made by such combinations as the Standard 
Oil Company, the Bessemer Steel Eing, the Whisky Tax 
Ring, the Lucifer Match Ring, and the various rings for 
the " protection of the American workman from the pauper 
labor of Europe." 

Or take the fortunes made out of successful patents. 
Like that element in so many fortunes that comes from 
the increased value of land, these result from monopoly, 
pure and simple. And though I am not now discussing 
the expediency of patent laws, it may be observed, in 
passing, that in the vast m'ajority of cases the men who 
make fortunes out of patents are not the men who make 
the inventions. 

Through all great fortunes, and, in fact, through nearly 
all acquisitions that in these days can fairly be termed 
fortunes, these elements of monopoly, of spoliation, of 
gambling run. The head of one of the largest manufac- 
turing firms in the United States said to me recently, " It 
is not on our ordinary business that we make our money ; 
it is where we can get a monopoly." And this, I think, is 
generally true. 

Consider the important part in building up fortunes 
which the increase of land values has had, and is having, 
in the United States. This is, of course, monopoly, piu-e 
and simple. When land increases in value it does not 
mean that its owner has added to the general wealth. The 



56 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

owner may never have seen tlie land or done aught to 
improve it. He may, and often does, live in a distant city 
or in another country. Increase of land values simply 
means that the owners, by virtue of their appropriation 
of something that existed before man was, have the power 
of taking a larger share of the wealth produced by other 
people's labor. Consider how much the monopolies created 
and the advantages given to the unscrupulous by the tariff 
and by our system of internal taxation— how much the 
railroad (a business in its nature a monopoly), telegraph, 
gas, water and other similar monopolies, have done to 
concentrate wealth ; how special rates, pools, combinations, 
corners, stock- watering and stock-gambling, the destructive 
use of wealth in driving off or buying off opposition which 
the public must finally pay for, and many other things 
which these will suggest, have operated to build up large 
fortunes, and it will at least appear that the unequal dis- 
tribution of wealth is due in great measure to sheer 
spoliation ; that the reason why those who work hard get 
so little, while so many who work little get so much, is, 
in very large measure, that the earnings of the one class 
are, in one way or another, filched away from them to 
swell the incomes of the other. 

That individuals are constantly making their way from 
the ranks of those who get less than their earnings to the 
ranks of those who get more than their earnings, no more 
proves this state of things right than the fact that merchant 
sailors were constantly becoming pirates and participating 
in the profits of piracy, would prove that piracy was right 
and that no effort should be made to suppress it. 

I am not denouncing the rich, nor seeking, by speaking 
of these things, to excite envy and hatred; but if we 
would get a clear understanding of social problems, we 
must recognize the fact that it is due to monopolies which 
we permit and create, to advantages which we give one man 



THE WRONG IN EXISTING SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 57 

over another, to methods of extortion sanctioned by law 
and by pubhc opinion, that some men are enabled to get 
so enormously rich while others remain so miserably poor. 
If we look around us and note the elements of monopoly, 
extortion and spoliation which go to the building up of 
all, or nearly all, fortunes, we see on the one hand how 
disingenuous are those who preach to us that there is 
nothing wrong in social relations and that the inequalities 
in the distribution of wealth spring from the inequalities 
of human nature ; and on the other hand, we see how wild 
are those who talk as though capital were a public enemy, 
and propose plans for arbitrarily restricting the acquisition 
of wealth. Capital is a good ; the capitalist is a helper, if 
he is not also a monopolist. We can safely let any one get 
as rich as he can if he will not despoil others in doing so. 
There are deep wrongs in the present constitution of 
society, but they are not wrongs inherent in the constitu- 
tion of man nor in those social laws which are as truly the 
laws of the Creator as are the laws of the physical universe. 
They are wrongs resulting from bad adjustments which it 
is within our power to amend. The ideal social state is 
not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, 
but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution 
to the general stock. And in such a social state there 
would not be less incentive to exertion than now; there 
would be far more incentive. Men will be more indus- 
trious and more moral, better workmen and better citizens, 
if each takes his earnings and carries them home to his 
family, than where they put their earnings in a '' pot" and 
gamble for them until some have far more than they couM 
have earned, and others have little or nothing. 



CHAPTER VII. 

IS IT THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS? 

THERE are worlds and worlds— even within the bounds 
of the same horizon. The man who comes into Nevr 
York with plenty of money, who puts np at the Windsor 
or Brunswick, and is received by hospitable hosts in Fifth 
Avenue mansions, sees one New York. The man who 
comes with a dollar and a half, and goes to a twenty-five- 
cent lodging-house, sees another. There are also fifteen- 
cent lodging-houses, and people too poor to go even to 
them. 

Into the pleasant avenues of the Park, in the bright May 
sunshine, dashes the railroad- wrecker's daughter, her tasty 
riding-habit floating free from the side of her glistening 
bay, and her belted groom, in fresh top-boots and smart 
new livery, clattering after, at a respectful distance, on 
another blooded horse, that chafes at the bit. The stock- 
gambler's son, rising from his trotter at every stride, in 
English fashion, his English riding-stick grasped by the 
middle, raises his hat to her nod. And as he v/hirls past 
in his London-made dog-cart, a liveried servant sitting 
with folded arms behind him, she exchanges salutations 
with the high-born descendant of the Dutch gardener, 
whose cabbage-patch, now covered with brick and mortar, 
has become an " estate " of lordly income. While in the 
soft, warm air rings a musical note, and drawn by mettled 
steeds, the four-in-hands of the coaching club rush by, 



IS IT THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS? 59 

with liveried guards and coach-tops filled with chattering 
people, to whom life, with its round of balls, parties, 
theaters, flirtations and excursions, is a holiday, in which, 
but for the invention of new pleasures, satiety would make 
time drag. 

How different this bright world from that of the old 
woman who, in the dingy lower street, sits from morning 
to night beside her little stock of apples and candy ; from 
that of the girls who stand all day behind counters and 
before looms, who bend over sewing-machines for weary, 
weary hours, or who come out at night to prowl the 
streets ! 

One railroad king puts the great provinces of his realm 
in charge of satraps and goes to Europe ; the new steel 
yacht of another is being fitted, regardless of expense, for 
a voyage around the world, if it pleases him to take it; a 
third will not go abroad— he is too busy buying in his 
"little old railroad" every day. Other human beings are 
ga.thered into line every Sunday afternoon by the Rev. 
Coffee-and-rolls-man, and listen to his preaching for the 
dole they a,re to get. And upon the benches in the squares 
sit men from whose sullen, deadened faces the fire of 
energy and the light of hope have gone — 'Hramps" and 
'' bums," the broken, rotted, human driftwood, the pariahs 
of our society. 

I stroll along Broadway in the evening, and by the 
magnificent saloon of the man who killed Jim Fisk, I meet 
a good fellow whom I knew years ago in California, when 
he could not jingle more than one dollar on another. It 
is different now, and he takes a wad of bills from his 
pocket to pay for the thirty-five-cent cigars we light. He 
has rooms in the most costly of Broadway hotels, his 
clothes are cut by Blissert, and he thinks Delmonico's 
about the only place to get a decent meal. He tells me 
about some "big things" he has got into, and talks about 



60 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

millions as though they were marbles. If a man has any 
speed in him at all, he says, it is just as easy to deal in 
big things as in little things, and the men who play such 
large hands in the great game are no smarter than other 
men, when you get alongside of them and take theii' 
measure. As to pohtics, he says, it is only a question 
who hold the offices. The corporations rule the country, 
and are going to rule it, and the man is a fool who doesn't 
get on their side. As for the people, what do they know 
or care ! The press rules the people, and capital rules the 
press. Better hunt with the dogs than be hunted with 
the hare. 

We part, and as I turn down the street another acquain- 
tance greets me, and, as his conversation grows interesting, 
I go out of my way, for to delay him were sin, as he must 
be at work by two in the morning. He has been trying 
to read " Progress and Poverty," he says : but he has to 
take it in such little snatches, and the children make such 
a noise in his two small rooms— for his wife is afraid to 
let them out on the street to learn so much bad— that it 
is hard work to understand some parts of it. He is a 
journeyman baker, but he has a good situation as jour- 
neyman bakers go. He works in a restaurant, and only 
twelve hours a day. Most bakers, he tells me, have to 
work fourteen and sixteen hours. Some of the places 
they work in would sicken a man not used to it, and even 
those used to it are forced to lie off every now and again, 
and to drink, or they could not stand it. In some bakeries 
they use good stock, he says, but they have to charge high 
prices, which only the richer people wiU pay. In most of 
them 5''ou often have to sift the maggots out of the flour, 
and the butter is always rancid. He belongs to a Union, 
and they are trying to get in all the journeyman bakers ; 
but those that work longest, and have most need of it, are 
the hardest to get. Their long hours make them stupid, 



IS IT THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WOELDS? 61 

and take all the spirit out of them. He has tried to get 
into business for himself, and he and his wife once pinched 
and saved till they got a few hundred dollars, and then 
set up a little shop. But he had not money enough to buy a 
share in the Flour Association— a cooperative association 
of boss bakers, by which the members get stock at lowest 
rates— and he could not compete, lost his money, and had 
to go to work again as a journeyman. He can see no 
chance at all of getting out of it, he says ; he sometimes 
thinks he might as well be a slave. His family grows 
larger and it costs more to keep them. His rent was raised 
two dollars on the 1st of May. His wife remonstrated 
with the agent, said they were making no more, and it 
cost them more to live. The agent said he could not help 
that ; the property had increased in value, and the rents 
must be raised. The reason people complained of rents 
was that they lived too extravagantly, and thought they 
must have everything anybody else had. People could 
live, and keep strong and fat, on nothing but oatmeal. If 
they would do that they would find it easy enough to pay 
their rent. 

There is such a rush across the Atlantic that it is diffi- 
cult to engage a passage for months ahead. The doors 
of the fine, roomy houses in the fashionable streets will 
soon be boarded up, as their owners leave for Europe, for 
the sea-shore, or the mountains. ''Everybody is out of 
town," they will say. Not quite everybody, though. Some 
twelve or thirteen hundred thousand people, without 
counting Brooklyn, will be left to swelter through the 
hot summer. The swarming tenement-houses will not be 
boarded up ; every window and door will be open to catch 
the least breath of air. The dirty streets will be crawling 
with squalid life, and noisy with the play of unkempt 
children, who never saw a green field or watched the curl 
of fi l?reaker, save perhaps, wheu dhmtj gave them a treat, 



62 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

Dragged women will be striving to quiet pining babies, 
sobbing and wailing away their little lives for the want 
of wholesome nourishment and fresh air ; and degradation 
and misery that hide during the winter will be seen on 
every hand. 

In such a city as this, the world of some is as different 
from the world in which others live as Jupiter may be 
from Mars. There are worlds we shut our eyes to, and 
do not bear to think of, still less to look at, but in which 
human beings yet live— worlds in which vice takes the 
place of virtue, and from which hope here and hope here- 
after seem utterly banished— brutal, discordant, torturing 
hells of wickedness and suffering. 

"Why do they cry for bread?" asked the innocent 
French princess, as the roar of the fierce, hungry mob 
resounded through the courtyard of Versailles. " If they 
have no bread, why don't they eat cake ? " 

Yet, not a fool above other fools was the pretty princess, 
who never in her whole life had known that cake was not 
to be had for the asking. " Why are not the poor thrifty 
and virtuous and wise and temperate ? " one hears whenever 
in luxurious pa,rlors such subjects are mentioned. What 
is this but the question of the French princess? Thrift 
and virtue and wisdom and temperance are not the fruits 
of poverty. 

But it is not this of which I intended here to speak so 
much as of that complacent assumption which runs through 
current thought and speech, that this world in which we, 
nineteenth-century. Christian, American men and women 
live, is, in its social adjustments, at least, about such a 
world as the Almighty intended it to be. 

Some say this in terms, others say it hy implication, but 
in one form or another it is constantly taught. Even the 
wonders of modern invention have, with a most influential 
part of society, scarcely shaken the belief that social 



IS IT THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WOELDS? 63 

hnprovement is impossible. Men of the sort who, a little 
while ago, derided the idea that steam-carriages might be 
driven over the land and steam- vessels across the sea, 
would not now refuse to believe in the most startling 
mechanical invention. But he who thinks society may be 
improved, he who thinks that poverty and greed may be 
driven from the world, is still looked upon in circles that 
pfide themselves on their culture and rationalism as a 
dreamer, if not as a dangerous lunatic. 

The old idea that everything in the social world is 
ordered by the Divine Will— that it is the mysterious 
dispensations of Providence that give wealth to the few 
and order poverty as the lot of the many, make some 
rulers and the others serfs — is losing power; but another 
idea that serves the same purpose is taking its place, and 
we are told, in the name of science, that the only social 
improvement that is possible is by a slow race-evolution, 
of which the fierce struggle for existence is the impelling 
force ; that, as I have recently read in " a journal of civili- 
zation " from the pen of a man who has turned from the 
preaching of what he called Christianity to the teach- 
ing of what he caUs political economy, "only the elite of 
the race has been raised to the point where reason and 
conscience can even curb the lower motive forces," and 
" that for all but a few of us the limit of attainment in 
life, in the best case, is to live out our term, to pay our 
debts, to place three or four children in a position as good 
as the father's was, and there make the account balance." 
As for "friends of humanity," and those who would "help 
the poor," they get from him the same scorn which the 
Scribes and Pharisees eighteen hundred years ago visited 
on a pestilent social reformer whom they finally crucified. 

Lying beneath all such theories is the selfishness that 
would resist a.ny inquiry into the titles to the wealth which 
greed has gathered, and the difficulty and indisposition on 



64 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

the part of the comfortable classes of realizing the exis- 
tence of any other world than that seen through their own 
eyes. 

That "one-half of the world does not know how the 
other haK live," is much more true of the upper than of 
the lower half. We look upon that which is pleasant 
rather than that which is disagreeable. The shop-gii'l 
delights in the loves of the Lord de Maltravers and the 
Lady Blanche, just as children without a penny will gaze 
in confectioners' windows, as hungry men dream of feasts, 
and poor men relish tales of sudden wealth. And social 
suffering is for the most part mute. The well-dressed take 
the main street, but the ragged slink into the byways. 
The man in a good coat will be listened to where the same 
man in tatters would be hustled off. It is that part of 
society that has the best reason to be satisfied with things 
as they are that is heard in the press, in the church, and 
in the school, and that forms the conventional opinion 
that this world in which we American Christians, in the 
latter half of the nineteenth century, live is about as good 
a world as the Creator (if there is a Creator) intended it 
should be. 

But look around. All over the world the beauty and 
the glory and the grace of civilization rest on human lives 
crushed into misery and distortion. 

I will not speak of G-ermany, of France, of England. 
Look even here, where European civihzation flowers in 
the free field of a new continent ; where there are no kings, 
no great standing armies, no relics of feudal servitude; 
where national existence began with the solemn declaration 
of the equal and inalienable rights of men. I clip, almost 
at random, from a daily paper, for I am not seeking the 
blackest shadows : 

Margaret Hickey, aged 30 years, came to tliis city a few days ago 
from Boston with a seven- weeks-old baby. Slie tried to get work, but 



IS IT THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS? 65 

was not successful. Saturday nigM she placed the child in a cellar 
at No. 226 West Forty-second Street. At midnight she called at 
Police Headquarters and said she had lost her baby in Forty-third 
Street. In the meantime an officer found the child. The mother 
was held until yesterday morning, when she was taken to Yorkville 
Court and sent to the Island for six months. 

Morning and evening, day after day, in these times of 
peace and prosperity, one may read in our daily papers 
such items as this, and worse than this. We are so used 
to them that they excite no attention and no comment. 
We know what the fate of Margaret Hickey, aged thirty 
years, and of her baby, aged seven weeks, sent to the 
Island for six months, will be. Better for them and 
better for society were they drowned outright, as we 
would drown a useless cat and mangy kitten; but so 
common are such items that we glance at them as we 
glance at the number of birds wounded at a pigeon-match, 
and turn to read " what is going on in society'' ; " of the 
last new opera or play; of the cottages taken for the 
season at Newport or Long Branch ; of the millionaire's 
divorce or the latest great defalcation ; how Heber Newton 
is to be driven out of the Episcopal Church for declaring 
the Song of Solomon a love-drama, and the story of Jonah 
and the whale a poetical embellishment ; or how the great 
issue which the American people are to convulse them- 
selves about next year is the turning of the Eepublican 
party out of power. 

I read the other day in a Brooklyn paper of a coroner's 
jury summoned to inquire, as the law directs, into the 
cause of death of a two days' infant. The unwholesome 
room was destitute of everything save a broken chair, a 
miserable bed and an empty whisky-bottle. On the bed 
lay, uncared for, a young girl, mother of the dead infant ; 
over the chair, in drunken stupor, sprawled a man — her 
father. "The horror-stricken jury," said the report 



66 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

"rendered a verdict in accordance witli tlie facts, and 
left the place as fast as they could." So do we turn from 
these horrors. Are there not policemen and station-houses, 
almshouses and charitable societies ? 

Nevertheless, we send missionaries to the heathen ; and 
I read the other day how the missionaries, sent to preach 
to the Hindus the Baptist version of Christ's gospel, had 
been financed out of the difference between American 
currency and Indian rupees by the godly men who stay at 
home and boss the job. Yet, from Arctic to Antarctic 
Circle, where are the heathen among whom such degraded 
and distorted human beings are to be found as in our 
centers of so-caUed Christian civilization, where we have 
such a respect for the aU-seeing eye of God that if you 
want a drink on Sunday you must go into the saloon by 
the back door ? Among what tribe of savages, who never 
saw a missionary, can the cold-blooded horrors testified 
to in the Tewksbury Almshouse investigation be matched ? 
"Babies don't generally live long here," they told the 
farmer's wife who brought them a little waif. And 
neither did they— seventy-three out of seventy-four dying 
in a few weeks, their little bodies sold off at a round rate 
per dozen to the dissecting-table, and a six months' infant 
left there two days losing three pounds in weight. Nor 
did adults— the broken men and women who there sought 
shelter— fare better. They were robbed, starved, beaten, 
turned into marketable corpses as fast as possible, while 
the highly respectable managers waxed fat and rich, and 
set before legislative committees the best of dinners and 
the choicest of wines. It were slander to dumb brutes to 
speak of the bestial cruelty disclosed by the opening of 
this whited sepulcher. Yet, not only do the representa- 
tives of the wealth and culture and "high moral ideas" 
of Massachusetts receive coldly these revelations, they fight 
bitterly the man who has made them, as though the drag- 



IS IT THE BEST OP ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS? 67 

ging of sucli horrors to light, not the doing of them, were 
the unpardonable sin. They were only paupers ! And I 
read in the journal founded by Horace Greeley, that '' the 
woes of the Tewksbury paupers are no worse than the 
common lot of all inmates of pauper refuges the country 
over." 

Or take the revelations made this winter before a legis- 
lative committee of the barbarities practised in New York 
state prisons. The system remains unaltered; not an 
of&cial has been even dismissed. The belief that dominates 
our society is evidently that which I find expressed in '' a 
journal of civilization" by a reverend professor at Yale, 
that "the criminal has no claims against society at all. 
What shall be done with him is a question of expediency " ! 
I wonder if our missionaries to the heathen ever read the 
American papers ? I am certain they don't read them to 
the heathen. 

Behind all this is social disease. Criminals, paupers, 
prostitutes, women who abandon their children, men who 
kill themselves in despair of making a living, the existence 
of great armies of beggars and thieves, prove that there 
are large classes who find it difficult with the hardest toil 
to make an honest and sufficient livelihood. So it is. 
" There is," incidentally said to me, recently, a New York 
Supreme Judge, "a large class— I was about to say a 
majority— of the population of New York and Brooklyn, 
who just live, and to whom the rearing of two more chil- 
dren means inevitably a boy for the penitentiary and a 
girl for the brothel." A partial report of charitable work 
in New York city, not embracing the operations of a 
number of important societies, shows 36,000 families 
obtaining relief, while it is estimated that were the houses 
in New York city containing criminals and the recipients 
of charity set side by side they would make a street 
twenty-two miles long. One charitable society in New 



68 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

York city extended aid this winter to the families of three 
hundred tailors. Their wages are so small when they do 
work that when work gives out they must beg, steal or 
starve. 

Nor is this state of things confined to the metropolis. 
In Massachusetts the statistician of the Labor Bureau 
declares that among wage laborers the earnings (exclusive 
of the earnings of minors) are less than the cost of living ; 
that in the majority of cases working-men do not support 
their families on their individual earnings alone, and that 
fathers are forced to depend upon their children for from 
one-quarter to one-third of the family earnings, children 
under fifteen supplying from one-eighth to one-sixth of 
the total earnings. Miss Emma E. Brown has shown how 
parents are forced to evade the law prohibiting the employ- 
ment of young children, and in Pennsylvania, where a 
similar law has been passed, I read how, forced b}'- the 
same necessity, the operatives of a mill have resolved to 
boycott a storekeeper whose relative had informed that 
children under thirteen were employed. While in Canada 
last winter it was shown that children under thirteen were 
kept at work in the mills from six in the evening to six in 
the morning, a man on duty with a strap to keep them 
awake. 

Illinois is one of the richest States of the Union. It is 
scarcely yet fairly settled, for the last census shows the 
male population in excess of the female, and wages are 
considerably higher than in more eastern States. In their 
last report the Illinois Commissioners of Labor Statistics 
say that their tables of wages and cost of living are repre- 
sentative only of intelligent working-men who make the 
most of their advantages, and do not reach " the confines 
of that world of helpless ignorance and destitution in 
which multitudes in aU large cities continuaJh' live, and 
whose only statistics are those of epidemics, pauperism and 



IS IT THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS? 69 

crime." Nevertlieless, tliey go on to say, an examination 
of these tables will demonstrate that one-half of these 
intelligent working-men of Illinois " are not even able to 
earn enough for their daily bread, and have to depend 
upon the labor of women and children to eke out their 
miserable existence." 

It is the fool who saith in his heart there is no God. 
But what shall we call the man who teUs us that with this 
sort of a world God bids us be content ? 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THAT WE ALL MIGHT BE RICH. 

THE terms ricli and poor are of course frequently used 
in a relative sense. Among Irish peasants, kept on 
the verge of starvation by the tribute wrung from them 
to maintain the luxury of absentee landlords in London 
or Paris, '' the woman of three cows" will be looked on as 
rich, while in the society of millionaires a man with only 
$500,000 will be regarded as poor. Now, we cannot, of 
course, all be rich in the sense of having more than others ; 
but when people say, as they so often do, that we cannot 
all be rich, or when they say that we must always have 
the poor with us, they do not use the words in this com^ 
parative sense. They mean by the rich those who have 
enough, or more than enough, wealth to gratify all rea- 
sonable wants, and by the poor those who have not. 

Now, using the words in this sense, I join issue with 
those who say that we cannot all be rich ; with those who 
declare that in human society the poor must always exist. 
I do not, of course, mean that we all might have an array 
of servants; that we all might outshine each other in 
dress, in equipage, in the lavishness of our balls or dinners, 
in the magnificence of our houses. That would be a con- 
tradiction in terms. What I mean is, that we all might 
have leisure, comfort and abundance, not merely of the 
necessaries, but even of what are now esteemed the ele- 
gancies and luxuries of life. I do not mean to say that 



THAT WE ALL MIGHT BE EICH. 71 

absolute equality could be had, or would be desirable. I 
do not mean to say that we could all have, or would want, 
the same quantity of all the different forms of wealth. 
But I do mean to say that we might all have enough 
wealth to satisfy reasonable desires; that we might all 
have so much of the material things we now struggle for, 
that no one would want to rob or swindle his neighbor ; 
that no one would worry all day, or lie awake at nights, 
fearing he might be brought to poverty, or thinking how 
he might acquire wealth. 

Does this seem an Utopian dream ? What would people 
of fifty years ago have thought of one who would have 
told them that it was possible to sew by steam-power ; to 
cross the Atlantic in six days, or the continent in three ; 
to have a message sent from London at noon delivered in 
Boston three hours before noon ; to hear in New York the 
voice of a man talking in Chicago ? 

Did you ever see a pail of swill given to a pen of hungry 
hogs ! That is human society as it is. 

Did you ever see a company of well-bred men and women 
sitting down to a good dinner, without scrambling, or 
jostling, or gluttony, each, knowing that his own appetite 
will be satisfied, deferring to and helping the others ? That 
is human society as it might be. 

" Devil catch the hindmost " is the motto of our so-called 
civilized society to-day. We learn early to "take care of^ 
No. 1," lest No. 1 should suffer ; we learn early to grasp 
from others that we may not want ourselves. The fear 
of poverty makes us admire great wealth ; and so habits 
of greed are formed, and we behold the pitiable spectacle 
of men who have already more than they can by any pos- 
sibility use, toiling, striving, grasping to add to their store 
up to the very verge of the grave— that grave which, 
whatever else it may mean, does certainly mean the parting 
with all earthly possessions however great they be. 



72 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

In vain, in gorgeous churclies, on the appointed Sunday- 
is the parable of Dives and Lazarus read. What can it 
mean in churches where Dives would be welcomed and 
Lazarus shown the door? In vain may the preacher 
preach of the vanity of riches, while poverty engulfs the 
liiudmost. But the mad struggle would cease when the 
fear of poverty had vanished. Then, and not till then, 
will a truly Christian civihzation become possible. 

And may not this be ? 

We are so accustomed to poverty that even in the most 
advanced countries we regard it as the natural lot of the 
great masses of the people ; that we take it as a matter of 
course that even in our highest civilization large classes 
should want the necessaries of healthful life, and the vast 
majority should only get a poor and pinched living by the 
hardest toU. There are professors of political economy 
who teach that this condition of things is the result of 
social laws of which it is idle to complain ! There are 
ministers of religion who preach that this is the condition 
which an all-wise, all-powerful Creator intended for his 
children ! If an architect were to build a theater so that 
not more than one-tenth of the audience could see and 
hear, we would call him a bungler and a botch. If a man 
were to give a feast and provide so little food that nine- 
tenths of his guests must go away hungry, we would call 
him a fool, or worse. Yet so accustomed are we to 
poverty, that even the preachers of what passes for Chris- 
tianity tell us that the great Architect of the Universe, to 
whose infinite skill aU nature testifies, has made such a 
botch job of this world that the vast majority of the 
human creatures whom he has called into it are condemned 
by the conditions he has imposed to want, suffering, and 
brutalizing toil that gives no opportunity for the develop- 
ment of mental powers— must pass their lives in a hard 
struggle to merely live ! 



THAT WE ALL MIGHT BE EICH. 73 

Yet who can look about Mm without seeing that to 
whatever cause poverty may be due, it is not due to the 
niggardliness of nature ; without seeing that it is blindness 
or blasphemy to assume that the Creator has condemned 
the masses of men to hard toil for a bare living ? 

If some men have not enough to live decently, do not 
others have far more than they really need ? If there is 
not wealth sufficient to go around, giving every one 
abundance, is it because we have reached the limit of the 
production of wealth ? Is our land all in use ? is our labor 
all employed ? is our capital all utilized ? On the contrary, 
in whatever direction we look we see the most stupendous 
waste of productive forces — of productive forces so potent 
that were they permitted to play freely the production of 
wealth would be so enormous that there would be more 
than a sufficiencj'^ for all. What branch of production is 
there in which the limit of production has been reached ? 
What single article of wealth is there of which we might 
not produce enormously more ? 

If the mass of the population of New York are jammed 
into the fever-breeding rooms of tenement-houses, it is not 
because there are not vacant lots enough in and around 
New York to give each family space for a separate home. 
If settlers are going into Montana and Dakota and Mani- 
toba, it is not because there are not vast areas of untilled 
land much nearer the centers of population. If farmers 
are paying one-fourth, one-third, or even one-half their 
crops for the privilege of getting land to cultivate, it is 
not because there are not, even in our oldest States, great 
quantities of land which no one is cultivating. 

So true is it that poverty does not come from the ina- 
bility to produce more wealth that from every side we 
hear that the power to produce is in excess of the ability 
to find a market ; that the constant fear seems to be not 
that too little, but that too much, will be produced ! Do 



74 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

we not maintain a high tariff, and keep at every port a 
horde of Custom-House officers, for fear the people of 
other countries will overwhelm us with their goods ? Is 
not a great part of our machinery constantly idle ? Are 
there not, even in what we call good times, an immense 
number of unemployed men who would gladly be at work 
producing wealth if they could only get the opportunity ? 
Do we not, even now, hear, from every side, of embarrass- 
ment from the very excess of productive power, and of 
combinations to reduce production ? Coal operators band 
together to limit their output ; iron-works have shut down, 
or are running on half-time ; distillers have agreed to limit 
their production to one-half their capacity, and sugar- 
refiners to sixty per cent. ; paper-mills are suspending for 
one, two or three days a week ; the gunny-cloth manufac- 
turers, at a recent meeting, agreed to close their mills untU 
the present overstock on the market is greatly reduced ; 
many other manufacturers have done the same thing. The 
shoemaking machinery of New England can, in six months' 
full running, it is said, supply the whole demand of the 
United States for twelve months; the machinery for 
making rubber goods can turn out twice as much as the 
market will take. 

This seeming glut of production, this seeming excess of 
productive power, runs through all branches of industry, 
and is evident all over the civilized world. From black- 
berries, bananas or apples, to ocean steamships or plate- 
glass mirrors, there is scarcely an article of human comfort 
or convenience that could not be produced in very much 
greater quantities than now without lessening the pro- 
duction of anything else. 

So evident is this that many people think and talk and 
write as though the trouble is that there is not worh 
enough to go around. We are in constant fear that other 
nations may do for us some of the work we might do for 



THAT WE ALL MiaHT BE EICH. 75 

ourselves, and, to prevent them, guard ourselves with a 
tariff. We laud as public benefactors those who, as we 
say, "furnish employment." We are constantly talking 
as though this " furnishing of employment," this " giving 
of work," were the greatest boon that could be conferred 
upon society. To listen to much that is talked and much 
that is written, one would think that the cause of poverty 
is that there is not work enough for so many people, and 
that if the Creator had made the rock harder, the soil less 
fertile, iron as scarce as gold, and gold as diamonds ; or 
if ships would sink and cities burn down oftener, there 
would be less poverty, because there would be more work 
to do. 

The Lord Mayor of London teUs a deputation of unem- 
ployed working-men that there is no demand for their 
labor, and that the only resource for them is to go to 
the poorhouse or emigrate. The English government is 
shipping from Ireland able-bodied men and women to 
avoid maintaining them as paupers. Even in our own 
land there are at all times large numbers, and in hard 
times vast numbers, earnestly seeking work — the oppor- 
tunity to give labor for the things produced by labor. 

Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the enormous forces 
of production constantly going to waste than the fact 
that the most prosperous time in all branches of business 
that this country has known was during the civil war, 
when we were maintaining great fleets and armies, and 
millions of our industrial population were engaged in 
supplying them with wealth for unproductive consumption 
or for reckless destruction. It is idle to talk about the 
fictitious prosperity of those " flush " times. The masses 
of the people lived better, dressed better, found it easier 
to get a living, and had more luxuries and amusements 
than in normal times. There was more real, tangible 
wealth in the North at the close than at the beginning of 



76 SOCIAL PKOBLEMS. 

the war. Nor was it the great issue of paper money, nor 
the creation of the debt, which caused this prosperity. 
The government presses struck off promises to pay ; they 
could not print ships, cannon, arms, tools, food and cloth- 
ing. Nor did we borrow these things from other countries 
or '' from posterity." Our bonds did not begin to go to 
Europe until the close of the war, and the people of one 
generation can no more borrow from the people of a 
subsequent generation than we who live on this planet can 
borrow from the inhabitants of another planet or another 
solar system. The wealth consumed and destroyed by our 
fleets and armies came from the then existing stock of 
wealth. We could have carried on the war without the 
issue of a single bond, if, when we did not shrink from 
taking from wife and children their only bread-winner, 
we had not shrunk from taking the wealth of the rich. 

Our armies and fleets were maintained, the enormous 
unproductive and destructive use of wealth was kept up, 
by the labor and capital then and there engaged in pro- 
duction. And it was that the demand caused by the war 
stimulated productive forces into activity that the enormous 
drain of the war was not only supplied, but that the North 
grew richer. The waste of labor in marching and coun- 
termarching, in digging trenches, throwing up earthworks, 
and fighting battles, the waste of wealth consumed or 
destroyed by our armies and fleets, did not amount to as 
much as the waste constantly going on from unemployed 
labor and idle or partially used machinery. 

It is evident that this enormous waste of productive 
power is due, not to defects in the laws of nature, but to 
social maladjustments which deny to labor access to the 
natural opportunities of labor and rob the laborer of his 
just reward. Evidently the glut of markets does not really 
come from over-production when there are so many who 
want the things which are said to be over-produced, and 



THAT WE ALL MIGHT BE EICH. 77 

would gladly exchange their labor for them did they have 
opportunity. Every day passed in enforced idleness by a 
laborer who would gladly be at work could he find oppor- 
tunity, means so much less in the fund which creates the 
effective demand for other labor ; every time wages are 
screwed down means so much reduction in the purchasing 
power of the workmen whose incomes are thus reduced. 
The paralysis which at all times wastes productive power, 
and which in times of industrial depression causes more 
loss than a great war, springs from the difficulty which 
those who would gladly satisfy their wants by their labor 
find in doing so. It cannot come from any natural limi- 
tation, so long as human desii'es remain unsatisfied, and 
nature yet offers to man the raw material of wealth. It 
must come from social maladjustments which permit the 
monopohzation of these natural opportunities, and which 
rob labor of its fair reward. 

What these maladjustments are I shall in subsequent 
chapters endeavor to show. In this I wish simply to caU. 
attention to the fact that productive power in such a state 
of civilization as ours is sufficient, did we give it play, to 
so enormously increase the production of wealth as to give 
abundance to all— to point out that the cause of poverty 
is not in natural limitations, which we cannot alter, but v 
in inequalities and injustices of distribution entirely within 
our control. 

The passenger who leaves New York on a trans- Atlantic 
steamer does not fear that the provisions will give out. 
The men who run these steamers do not send them to sea 
without provisions enough for all they carry. Did He who 
made this whirling planet for our sojourn lack the fore- 
thought of man ? Not so. In soil and sunshine, in vege- 
table and animal life, in veins of minerals, and in pulsing 
forces which we are only beginning to use, are capabilities 
which we cannot exhaust— materials and powers from 



78 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

■whieli human effort, guided by intelligence, may gratify 
every material want of every human creature. There is 
in nature no reason for poverty — not even for the poverty 
of the crippled or the decrepit. For man is by nature a 
social animal, and the family affections and the social 
sympathies would, where chronic poverty did not distort 
and embrute, amply provide for those who could not 
provide for themselves. 

But if we will not use the intelligence with which we 
have been gifted to adapt social organization to natural 
laws — if we allow dogs in the manger to monopolize what 
they cannot use ; if we allow strength and cunning to rob 
honest labor, we must have chronic poverty, and all the 
social evils it inevitably brings. Under such conditions 
there would be poverty in paradise. 

'' The poor ye have always with you." If ever a scrip- 
ture has been wrested to the devil's service, this is that 
scripture. How often have these words been distorted 
from their obvious meaning to soothe conscience into 
acquiescence in human misery and degradation — to bolster 
that blasphemy, the very negation and denial of Christ's 
teachings, that the All- Wise and Most Merciful, the Infinite 
Father, has decreed that so many of his creatures must be 
poor in order that others of his creatures to whom he wills 
the good things of life should enjoy the pleasure and virtue 
of doling out alms ! " The poor ye have always with you," 
said Christ; but all his teachings supply the limitation, 
" until the coming of the Kingdom." In that kingdom of 
Grod on earth, that kingdom of justice and love for which 
he taught his followers to strive and pray, there will be no 
poor. But though the faith and the hope and the striv- 
ing for this kingdom are of the very essence of Christ's 
teaching, the stanchest disbelievers and revilers of its 
possibility are found among those who caU themselves 
Christians. Queer ideas of the Divinity have some of these 



THAT WE ALL MIGHT BE EICH. 79 

Ckristians who hold themselves orthodox and contribute 
to the conversion of the heathen. A very rich orthodox 
Christian said to a newspaper reporter, awhile ago, on the 
completion of a large work out of which he is said to have 
made millions: ''We have been peculiarly favored by 
Divine Providence ; iron never was so cheap before, and 
labor has been a drug in the market." 

That in spite of all our great advances we have yet with 
us the poor, those who, without fault of their own, cannot 
get healthful and wholesome conditions of life, is our fault 
and our shame. Who that looks about him can fail to see 
that it is only the injustice that denies natural opportunities 
to labor, and robs the producer of the fruits of his toil, 
that prevents us all from being rich ? Consider the enor- 
mous powers of production now going to waste ; consider 
the great number of unproductive consumers maintained 
at the expense of producers — the rich men and dudes, the 
worse than useless government officials, the pickpockets, 
burglars and confidence men ; the highly respectable thieves 
who carry on their operations inside the law; the great 
army of lawyers ; the beggars and paupers, and inmates of 
prisons ; the monopolists and cornerers and gamblers of 
every kind and grade. Consider how much brains and 
energy and capital are devoted, not to the production of 
wealth, but to the grabbing of wealth. Consider the 
waste caused by competition which does not increase 
wealth ; by laws which restrict production and exchange. 
Consider how human power is lessened by insufficient 
food, by unwholesome lodgings, by work done under 
conditions that produce disease and shorten Hfe. Con- 
sider how intemperance and unthrift foUow poverty. 
Consider how the ignorance bred of poverty lessens 
production, and how the vice bred of poverty causes 
destruction, and who can doubt that under conditions of 
social justice aU might be rich ? 



80 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

The wealtli-producing powers that would be evoked in 
a social state based on justice, where wealth went to the 
producers of wealth, and the banishment of poverty had 
banished the fear and greed and lusts that spring from it, 
we now can only faintly imagine. Wonderful as have 
been th« discoveries and inventions of this century, it is 
evident that we have only begun to grasp that dominion 
which it is given to mind to obtain over matter. Dis- 
covery and invention are born of leisure, of material 
comfort, of freedom. These secured to all, and who shall 
say to what command over nature man may not attain ? 

It is not necessary that any one should be condemned 
to monotonous toil; it is not necessary that any one 
should lack the wealth and the leisure which permit the 
development of the faculties that raise man above the 
animal. Mind, not muscle, is the motor of progress, the 
force which compels nature and produces wealth. In 
turning men into machines we are wasting the highest 
powers. Already in our society there is a favored class 
who need take no thought for the morrow— what they 
shall eat, or what they shall drink, or wherewithal they 
shall be clothed. And may it not be that Christ was more 
than a dreamer when he told his disciples that in that 
kingdom of justice for which he taught them to work and 
pray this might be the condition of aR ? 



CHAPTEE IX. 

FIRST PRINC-IPLES. 

WHOEVER considers the political and social problems 
that confront us, must see that they center in the 
problem of the distribution of wealth, and he must also 
see that, though their solution may be simple, it must be 
radical. 

For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But 
the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of 
the wrong. Half-way measures, mere ameliorations and 
secondary reforms, can at any time accomplish little, and 
can in the long run avail nothing. Our charities, our 
penal laws, our restrictions and prohibitions, by which, 
with so little avail, we endeavor to assuage poverty and 
check crime, what are they, at the very best, but the device 
of the clown who, having put the whole burden of his ass 
into one pannier, sought to enable the poor animal to walk 
straight by loading up the other pannier with stones ? 

In New York, as I write, the newspapers and the 
churches are calling for subscriptions to their ''fresh-air 
funds," that little children may be taken for a day or for 
a week from the deadly heat of stifling tenement rooms 
and given a breath of the fresh breeze of sea-shore or 
mountain ; but how little does it avail, when we take such 
children only to return them to their previous conditions 
— conditions which to many mean even worse than death 
of the body ; conditions which make it certain that of the 



82 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

lives that may thus be saved, some are saved for the 
brothel and the almshouse, and some for the penitentiary. 
We may go on forever merely raising fresh-air funds, and 
how great soever be the funds we raise, the need will only 
grow, and children— just such children as those of whom 
Christ said, " Take heed that ye despise not one of these 
little ones ; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels 
do always behold the face of my Father"— will die hke 
flies, so long as poverty compels fathers and mothers to the 
life of the squalid tenement room. We may open " mid- 
night missions " and support " Christian homes for desti- 
tute young girls," but what wOl they avail in the face of 
general conditions which render so many men unable 
to support a wife; which make young girls think it a 
privilege to be permitted to earn three dollars by eighty- 
one hours' work, and which can drive a mother to such 
despair that she will throw her babies from a wharf of our 
Christian city and then leap into the river herseK ! How 
vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barba- 
rous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as 
children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, 
so long as the bite of want drives men to crime ! How 
little better than idle is it for us to prohibit infant labor 
in factories when the scale of wages is so low that it will 
not enable fathers to support their families without the 
earnings of their little children ! How shall we try to 
prevent political corruption by framing new checks and 
setting one ofiicial to watch another official, when the fear 
of want stimulates the lust for wealth, and the rich thief 
is honored while honest poverty is despised ? 

Nor yet could we accomplish any permanent equalization 
in the distribution of wealth were we forcibly to take from 
those who have and give to those who have not. We 
would do great injustice ; we would work great harm ; but, 
from the very moment of such a forced equalization, the 



FIEST PRINCIPLES. 83 

tendencies which show themselves in the present unjust 
inequalities would begin to assert themselves again, and we 
would in a little while have as gross inequalities as before. 

What we must do if we would cure social disease and 
avert social danger is to remove the causes which prevent 
the just distribution of wealth. 

This work is only one of removal. It is not necessary 
for us to frame elaborate and skilful plans for securing 
the just distribution of wealth. For the just distribution 
of wealth is manifestly the natural distribution of wealth, 
and injustice in the distribution of wealth must, therefore, 
result from artificial obstructions to this natural distri- 
bution. 

As to what is the just distribution of wealth there can 
be no dispute. It is that which gives wealth to him who V 
makes it, and secures wealth to him who saves it. So 
clearly is this the only just distribution of wealth that 
even those shallow writers who attempt to defend the 
existing order of things are driven, by a logical necessity, 
falsely to assume that those who now possess the larger 
share of wealth made it and saved it, or got it by gift or 
by inheritance, from those who did make it and save it ; 
whereas the fact is, as I have in a previous chapter shown, 
that all these great fortunes, whose corollaries are paupers 
and tramps, really come from the sheer appropriation of 
the makings and savings of other people. 

And that this just distribution of wealth is the natural 
distribution of wealth can be plainly seen. Nature gives 
wealth to labor, and to nothing but labor. There is, and 
there can be, no article of wealth but such as labor has got 
by making it, or searching for it, out of the raw material 
which the Creator has given us to draw from. If there 
were but one man in the world it is manifest that he could 
have no more wealth than he was able to make and to 
save. This is the natural order. And, no matter how 



84 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

great be the population, or how elaborate the society, no 
one can have more wealth than he produces and saves, 
unless he gets it as a free gift from some one else, or by- 
appropriating the earnings of some one else. 

An English writer has divided all men into three classes 
—workers, beggars and thieves. The classification is not 
complimentary to the "upper classes" and the ''better 
classes," as they are accustomed to esteem themselves, yet it 
is economically true. There are only three ways by which 
any individual can get wealth— by work, by gift or by 
theft. And, clearly, the reason why the workers get so 
little is that the beggars and thieves get so much. When 
a man gets wealth that he does not produce, he necessarily 
gets it at the expense of those who produce it. 

All we need do to secure a just distribution of wealth, 
is to do that which all theories agree to be the primary 
function of government— to secure to each the free use of 
his own powers, limited only by the equal freedom of all 
others ; to secure to each the full enjoyment of his own 
earnings, limited only by such contributions as he may be 
fairly called upon to make for purposes of common benefit. 
When we have done this we shall have done all that we 
can do to make social institutions conform to the sense of 
justice and to the natural order. 

I wish to emphasize this point, for there are those who 
constantly talk and write as though whoever finds fault 
with the present distribution of wealth were demanding 
that the rich should be spoiled for the benefit of the poor ; 
that the idle should be taken care of at the expense of the 
industrious, and that a false and impossible equality should 
be created, which, by reducing every one to the same dead 
level, would destroy aU incentive to excel and bring prog- 
ress to a halt. 

In the reaction from the glaring injustice of present 
social conditions, such wild schemes have been proposed, 



FIRST PRINCIPLES. 85 

and still find advocates. But to my way of thinking they 
are as impracticable and repugnant as they can seem to 
those who are loudest in their denunciations of "com- 
munism." I am not willing to say that in the progress of 
humanity a state of society may not be possible which 
shall realize the formula of Louis Blanc, "From each 
according to his abilities ; to each according to his wants," 
for there exist to-day in the religious Orders of the Catholic 
Church, associations which maintain the communism of 
early Christianity. But it seems to me that the only 
power by which such a state of society can be attained 
and preserved is that which the framers of the schemes I 
speak of generally ignore, even when they do not directly 
antagonize — a deep, definite, intense, religious faith, so 
clear, so burning as utterly to melt away the thought of 
self— a general moral condition such as that which the 
Methodists declare, under the name of " sanetification," to 
be individually possible, in which the dream of pristine 
innocence should become reality, and man, so to speak, 
should again walk with God. 

But the possibility of such a state of society seems to 
me in the present stage of human development a specula- 
tion which comes within the higher domain of religious 
faith rather than that with which the economist or prac- 
tical statesman can concern himself. That nature, as it 
is apparent to us here, in this infinitesimal point in space 
and time that we call the world, is the highest expression 
of the power and purpose that called the universe into 
being, what thoughtful man dare affirm? Yet it is 
manifest that the only way by which man may attain 
higher things is by conforming his conduct to those com- 
mandments which are as obvious in his relations with his 
fellows and with external nature as though they were 
graved by the finger of Omnipotence upon tablets of 
imperishable stone. In the order of moral development;, 



86 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

Moses comes before Christ— " Thou shalt not kill ; " 
" Thou shalt not commit adultery ; " " Thou shalt not 
steal ; " before " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
The command, " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth 
out the corn," precedes the entrancing vision of universal 
peace, in which even nature's rapine shall cease, when the 
lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall 
lead them. 

That justice is the highest quality in the moral hier- 
archy I do not say j but that it is the first. That which is 
above justice must be based on justice, and include justice, 
and be reached through justice. It is not by accident 
that, in the Hebraic religious development which through 
Christianity we have inherited, the declaration, " The Lord 
thy God is a just Grod," precedes the sweeter revelation of 
a God of Love. Until the eternal justice is perceived, the 
eternal love must be hidden. As the individual must be 
just before he can be truly generous, so must human 
society be based upon justice before it can be based on 
benevolence. 

This, and this alone, is what I contend for— that our 
social institutions be conformed to justice; to those 
natural and eternal principles of right that are so obvious 
that no one can deny or dispute them — so obvious that 
by a law of the human mind even those who try to defend 
social injustice must invoke them. This, and this alone, 
I contend for— that he who makes should have ; that he 
who saves should enjoy. I ask in behalf of the poor 
nothing whatever that properly belongs to the rich. 
Instead of weakening and confusing the idea of property, 
I would surround it with stronger sanctions. Instead of 
lessening the incentive to the production of wealth, I 
would make it more powerful by making the reward more 
certain. Whatever any man has added to the general 
stock of wealth, or has received of the free wiU of him who 



FIRST PRINCIPLES. 87 

did produce it, let that be his as against all the world— 
his to use or to give, to do with it whatever he may please, 
so long as such use does not interfere with the equal 
freedom of others. For my part, I would put no limit on 
acquisition. No matter how many millions any man can 
get by methods which do not involve the robbery of others 
— they are his : let him have them. I would not even ask 
him for charity, or have it dinned into his ears that it is 
his duty to help the poor. That is his own affair. Let 
him do as he pleases with his own, without restriction and 
without suggestion. If he gets without taking from others, 
and uses without hurting others, what he does with his 
wealth is his own business and his own responsibility. 

I reverence the spirit that, in such cities as London and 
New York, organizes such great charities and gives to 
them such magnificent endowments, but that there is need 
for such charities proves to me that it is a slander upon 
Christ to call such cities Christian cities. I honor the 
Astors for having provided for New York the Astor 
Library, and Peter Cooper for having given it the Cooper 
Institute ; but it is a shame and a disgrace to the people 
of New York that such things should be left to private 
beneficence. And he who struggles for that recognition 
of justice which, by securing to each his own, will make 
it needless to beg for alms from one for another, is doing 
a greater and a higher work than he who builds churches, 
or endows hospitals, or founds colleges and libraries. 
This justice, which would first secure to each his own 
earnings, is, it seems to me, of that higher than almsgiving, 
which the Apostle had in mind, when he said, " Though I 
hestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body 
to he burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." 

Let us first ask what are the natural rights of men, and 
endeavor to secure them, before we propose either to beg 
or to pillage. 



88 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

In what succeeds I shall consider what are the natural 
rights of men, and how, under present social adjustments, 
they are ignored and denied. This is made necessary by 
the nature of this inquiry. But I do not wish to call upon 
those my voice may reach to demand their own rights, so 
much as to call upon them to secure the rights of others 
more helpless. I believe that the idea of duty is more 
potent for social improvement than the idea of interest ; 
that in sympathy is a stronger social force than in selfish- 
ness. I believe that any great social improvement must 
spring from, and be animated by, that spirit which seeks 
to make life better, nobler, happier for others, rather than 
by that spirit which only seeks more enjoyment for itself. 
For the Mammon of Injustice can always buy the selfish 
whenever it may think it worth while to pay enough ; but 
unselfishness it cannot buy. 

In the idea of the incarnation— of the God voluntarily 
descending to the help of men, which is embodied not 
merely in Christianity, but in other great religions— lies, 
I sometimes think, a deeper truth than perhaps even the 
churches teach. This is certain, that the deliverers, the 
liberators, the advancers of humanity, have always been 
those who were moved by the sight of injustice and misery 
rather than those spurred by their own suffering. As it 
was a Moses, learned in all the lore of the Egyptians, and 
free to the Court of Pharaoh, and not a tasked slave, 
forced to make bricks without straw, who led the Children 
of Israel from the House of Bondage; as it was the 
Gracchi, of patrician blood and fortune, who struggled to 
the death against the land-grabbing system which finally 
destroyed Rome, as it must, should it go on, in time destroy 
this repubKc, so has it always been that the oppressed, the 
degraded, the downtrodden have been freed and elevated 
rather by the efforts and the sacrifices of those to whom 
fortune had been more kind than by their own strength 



FIEST PRINCIPLES. 89 

For tte more fully men have been deprived of their natural ^ 
rights, the less their power to regain them. The more 
men need help, the less can they help themselves. 

The sentiment to which I would appeal is not envy, nor 
yet self-interest, but that nobler sentiment which found 
strong, though rude, expression in that battle-hymn which 
rang through the land when a great wrong was going 
down in blood : 

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea, 
With a glory in his bosom to transfigure you and me ; 
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free 1 * 

And what is there for which life gives us opportunity 
that can be compared with the e:^ort to do what we may, 
be it ever so little, to improve social conditions and enable 
other lives to reach fuller, nobler development ? Old John 
Brown, dying the death of the felon, launched into eternity 
with pinioned arms and the kiss of the slave child on his 
lips— was not his a greater life and a grander death than 
though his years had been given to self-seeking? Did he 
not take with him more than the man who grabs for wealth 
and leaves his millions ? Envy the rich ! Who that realizes 
that he must some day wake up in the beyond can envy 
those who spend their strength to gather what they cannot 
use here and cannot take away ? The only thing certain 
to any of us is death. '' Like the swallow darting through 
thy hall, such, O King, is the life of man ! " We come 
from where we know not; we go— who shall say? Im- 
penetrable darkness behind, and gathering shades before. 
What, when our time comes, does it matter whether we 
have fared daintily or not, whether we have worn soft 
raiment or not, whether we leave a great fortune or noth- 
ing at all, whether we shall have reaped honors or been 

* "Battle-Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe. 



90 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

despised, have been counted learned or ignorant— aa 
compared with how we may have used that talent which 
has been intrusted to us for the Master's service ? What 
shall it matter, when eyeballs glaze and ears grow dull, 
if out of the darkness may stretch a hand, and into the 
silence may come a voice : 

'' Well done, thou good and faithful servant : thou hast been 
faithful over a few things, I will maJce thee ruler over many 
things : enter thou into the joy of thy Lord I " 

I shall speak of rights, I shaU. speak of utility, I shaU 
speak of interest; I shall meet on their chosen ground 
those who say that the largest production of wealth is the 
greatest good, and material progress the highest aim. 
Nevertheless, I appreciate the truth embodied in these 
words of Mazzini to the working-classes of Italy, and 
would echo them : 

Working-men, brothers ! "When Christ came and changed the face 
of the world, he spoke not of rights to the rich, who needed not to 
achieve them ; nor to the poor, who would doubtless have abused 
them, in imitation of the rich ; he spoke not of utility, nor of interest, 
to a people whom interest and utility had corrupted ; he spoke of duty, 
he spoke of love, of sacrifice and of faith ; and he said that they 
should be first among all who had contributed most by their labor to 
the good of all. 

And the word of Christ breathed in the ear of a society in which 
all true life was extinct, recalled it to existence, conquered the mil- 
lions, conquered the world, and caused the education of the human 
race to ascend one degree on the scale of progress. 

Working-men ! We live in an epoch similar to that of Christ. We 
live in the midst of a society as corrupt as that of the Eoman Empire, 
feeling in our inmost souls the need of reanimating and transforming 
it, and of uniting all its various members in one sole faith, beneath 
one sole law, in one sole aim— the free and progressive development 
of all the faculties of which God has given the germ to his creatures. 
We seek the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, or, rather, 
that earth may become a preparation for heaven, and society an en- 
deavor after the progressive realization of the divine idea. 



FIEST PEINCIPLES. 91 

But Christ's every act was the visible representation of the faith 
he preached ; and around him stood apostles who incarnated in their 
actions the faith they had accepted. Be you such and you will con- 
quer. Preach duty to the classes about you, and fulfil, as far as in 
you lies, your own. Preach virtue, sacrifice and love ; and be your- 
selves virtuous, loving and ready for self-sacrifice. Speak your 
thoughts boldly, and make known your wants coui'ageously ; but 
without anger, without reaction, and without threats. The strongest 
menace, if indeed there be those for whom threats are necessary, 
will be the firmness, not the irritation, of your speech. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 

THERE are those who, when it suits their purpose, say- 
that there are uo natural rights, but that all rights 
spring from the grant of the sovereign political power. It 
were waste of time to argue with such persons. There 
are some facts so obvious as to be beyond the necessity of 
argument. And one of these facts, attested by universal 
consciousness, is that there are rights as between man and 
man which existed before the formation of government, 
and which continue to exist in spite of the abuse of govern- 
ment ; that there is a higher law than any human law— to 
wit, the law of the Creator, impressed upon and revealed 
through nature, which is before and above human laws, 
and upon conformity to which all human laws must depend 
for their validity. To deny this is to assert that there is 
no standard whatever by which the rightfulness or wrong- 
fulness of laws and institutions can be measured ; to assert 
that there can be no actions in themselves right and none 
in themselves wrong ; to assert that an edict which com- 
manded mothers to kiU their children should receive the 
same respect as a law prohibiting infanticide. 

These natural rights, this higher law, form the only true 
and sure basis for social organization. Just as, if we 
would construct a successful machine, we must conform to 
physical laws, such as the law of gravitation, the law of 
combustion, the law of expansion, etc.; just as, if we 



THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 93 

would maintain bodily health, we must conform to the 
laws of physiology ; so, if we would have a peaceful and 
healthful social state, we must conform our institutions 
to the great moral laws— laws to which we are absolutely 
subject, and which are as much above our control as are 
the laws of matter and of motion. And as, when we find 
that a machine will not work, we infer that in its construc- 
tion some law of physics has been ignored or defied, so 
when we find social disease and political evils may we infer 
that in the organization of society moral law has been 
defied and the natural rights of man have been ignored. 

These natural rights of man are thus set forth in the 
American Declaration of Independence as the basis upon 
which alone legitimate government can rest : 

We hold these truths to be self-evident— that all men are created 
equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalien- 
able rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness ; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted 
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the 
governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destruc- 
tive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish 
it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such 
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as shall seem to 
them most likely to effect their safety and happiness. 

So does the preamble to the Constitution of the United 
States appeal to the same principles : 

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more per- 
fect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for 
the common defense, promote the general weKare, and secure the 
blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish 
this Constitution for the United States of America. 

And so, too, is the same fundamental and self-evident 
truth set forth in that grand Declaration of the Rights of 
Man and of Citizens, issued by the National Assembly of 
France m 1789 ; 



94 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

The representatives of the people of France, formed into a National 
Assembly, considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt of human 
rights are the sole causes of public misfortunes and corruptions of govern- 
ment, have resolved to set forth, in a solemn declaration, those natu- 
ral, imprescriptible and inalienable rights, [and do] recognize and de- 
clare, in the presence of the Supreme Being, and with the hope of His 
blessing and favor, the following sacred rights of men and of citizens : 

I. Men are born and always continue free and equal in respect of 
their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can only be founded on 
public utility. 

II. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the 
natural and imprescriptible rights of man, and these rights are lib- 
erty, property, security, and resistance of oppression. 

It is one tMng to assert the eternal principles, as they 
are asserted in times of upheaval, when men of convictions 
and of the courage of their convictions come to the front, 
and another thing for a people just emerging from the 
night of ignorance and superstition, and enslaved by 
habits of thought formed by injustice and oppression, to 
adhere to and carry them out. The French people have 
not been true to these principles, nor yet, with far greater 
advantages, have we. And so, though the ancient regime, 
with its blasphemy of '' right divine," its Bastille and its 
lettres-de-cacliet, has been abolished in France ; there have 
come red terror and white terror. Anarchy masquerading 
as Freedom, and Imperialism deriving its sanction from 
universal suffrage, culminating in such a poor thing as 
the French Republic of to-day. And here, with our virgin 
soil, with our exemption from foreign complications, and 
our freedom from powerful and hostile neighbors, all we 
can show is another poor thing of a Republic, with its 
rings and its bosses, its railroad kings controlling sovereign 
states, its gangrene of corruption eating steadily toward 
the political heart, its tramps and its strikes, its ostentation 
of ill-gotten wealth its children toiling in factories, and 
its women working out their lives for bread ! 



THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 95 

It is possible for men to see the truth, and assert the 
truth, and to hear and repeat, again and again, formulas 
embodying the truth, without realizing all that that truth 
involves. Men who signed the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, or applauded the Declaration of Independence, men 
who year after year read it, and heard it, and honored it, 
did so without thinking that the eternal principles of right 
which it invoked condemned the existence of negro slavery 
as well as the tyranny of George III. And many who, 
awakening to the fuller truth, asserted the unalienable 
rights of man against chattel slavery, did not see that 
these rights involved far more than the denial of property 
in human flesh and blood; and as vainly imagined that 
they had fully asserted them when chattel slaves had been 
emancipated and given the suffrage, as their fathers vainly 
imagined they had fully asserted them, when they threw 
off allegiance to the English king and established here a 
democratic republic. 

The common belief of Americans of to-day is that among 
us the equal and unalienable rights of man are now aU 
acknowledged, while as for poverty, crime, low wages, 
"over-production," political corruption, and so on, they 
are to be referred to the nature of things— that is to say, 
if any one presses for a more definite answer, they exist 
because it is the will of God, the Creator, that they should 
exist. Yet I believe that these evils are demonstrably due 
to our failure fully to acknowledge the equal and unalien- 
able rights with which, as asserted as a self-evident truth 
by the Declaration of Independence, all men have been 
endowed by God, their Creator. I believe the National 
Assembly of France were right when, a century ago, 
inspired by the same spirit that gave us political freedom, 
they declared that the great cause of public misfortunes 
and corruptions of government is ignorance, neglect or 
contempt of human rights. And just as the famine which 



96 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

was then decimating France, tlie bankruptcy and corrup- 
tion of lier government, the brutish degradation of her 
working-classes, and the demoralization of her aristocracy, 
were directly traceable to the denial of the equal, natural 
and imprescriptible rights of men, so now the social and 
political problems which menace the American Republic, 
in common with the whole civilized world, spring from the 
same cause. 

Let us consider the matter. The equal, natural and 
unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
ness, does it not involve the right of each to the free use 
of his powers in making a living for himself and his 
family, limited only by the equal right of all others ? Does 
it not require that each shall be free to make, to save and 
to enjoy what wealth he may, without interference with 
the equal rights of others ; that no one shaU be compelled 
to give forced labor to another, or to yield up his earnings 
to another ; that no one shall be permitted to extort from 
another labor or earnings ? All this goes without the say- 
ing. Any recognition of the equal right to life and liberty 
which would deny the right to property— the right of a 
man to his labor and to the full fruits of his labor- 
would be mockery. 

But that is just what we do. Our so-caUed recognition 
of the equal and natural rights of man is to large classes 
of our people nothing but a mockery, and as social pres- 
sure increases, is becoming a more bitter mockery to larger 
classes, because our institutions fail to secure the rights 
of men to their labor and the fruits of their labor. 

That this denial of a primary human right is the cause 
of poverty on the one side and of overgrown fortunes on 
the other, and of all the waste and demoralization and 
corruption that flow from the grossly unequal distribution 
of wealth, may be easily seen. 

As I am speaking of conditions general over the whole 
civilized world, let us first take the case of another conn- 



THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 97 

try, for we can sometimes see the faults of our neighltors 
more clearly than our own. England, the country from 
which we derive our language and institutions, is behind 
us in the formal recognition of political liberty ; but there 
is as much industrial liberty there as here — and in some 
respects more, for England, though she has not yet reached 
free trade, has got rid of the "protective" swindle, which we 
still hug. And the English people— poor things— are, as a 
whole, satisfied with their freedom, and boast of it. They 
think, for it has been so long preached to them that most 
of them honestly believe it, that Englishmen are the freest 
people in the world, and they sing " Britons never shall 
be slaves," as though it were indeed true that slaves could 
not breathe British air. 

Let us take a man of the masses of this people — a 
"free-born Englishman," coming of long generations of 
"free-born Englishmen," in Wiltshire or Devonshire or 
Somersetshire, on soil which, if you could trace his gene- 
alogy, you would find his fathers have been tilling from 
early Saxon times. He grows to manhood, we will not 
stop to inquire how, and, as is the natural order, he takes 
himself a wife. Here he stands, a man among his fellows, 
in a world in which the Creator has ordained that he should 
get a living by his labor. He has wants, and as, in the 
natui'al order, children come to him, he will have more ; 
but he has in brain and muscle the natural power to satisfy 
these wants from the storehouse of nature. He knows 
how to dig and plow, to sow and to reap, and there is the 
rich soil, ready now, as it was thousands of years ago, to 
give back wealth to labor. The rain falls and the sun 
shines, and as the planet circles around her orbit, spring 
follows winter, and summer succeeds spring. It is this 
man's first and clearest right to earn his living, to trans- 
mute his labor into wealth, and to possess and enjoy that 
wealth for his own sustenance and benefit, and for the 
sustenance and benefit of those whom nature places in 



98 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

dependence on him. He has no right to demand any one 
else's earnings, nor has any one else a right to demand 
any portion of his earnings. He has no right to compel 
any one else to work for his benefit ; nor have others a 
right to demand that he shall work for their benefit. This 
right to himself, to the use of his own powers and the 
results of his own exertions, is a natural, self-evident right, 
which, as a matter of principle, no one can dispute, save 
upon the blasphemous contention that some men were 
created to work for other men. And this primary, natural 
right to his own labor, and to the fruits of his own labor, 
accorded, this man can abundantly provide for his own 
needs and for the needs of his family. His labor will, in 
the natural order, produce wealth, which, exchanged in 
accordance with mutual desires for wealth which others 
have produced, will supply his family with all the material 
comforts of life, and in the absence of serious accident, 
enable him to bring up his children, and lay by such a 
surplus that he and his wife may take their rest, and 
enjoy their sunset hour in the declining years when strength 
shall fail, without asking any one's alms or being beholden 
to any bounty save that of ''Our Father which art in 
hea.ven." 

But what is the fact ? The fact is, that the right of this 
"free-born Englishman" to his own labor and the fruits 
of his labor is denied as fully and completely as though 
he were made by law a slave ; that he is compelled to work 
for the enrichment of others as truly as though English 
law had made him the property of an owner. The law of 
the land does not declare that he is, a slave: on the con- 
trary, it formally declares that he is a free man— free to 
work for himself, and free to enjoy the fruits of his labor. 
But a man cannot labor without something to labor on, 
any more than he can eat without having something to 
eat. It is not in human powers to make something out 



THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 99 

of nothing. This is not contemplated in the creative 
scheme. Nature tells us that if we will not work we must 
starve ; but at the same time supplies us with everything 
necessary to work. Food, clothing, shelter, all the articles 
that minister to desire and that we call wealth, can be 
produced by labor, but only when the raw material of 
which they must be composed is drawn from the land. 

To drop a man in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and 
tell him he is at liberty to walk ashore, would not be more 
bitter irony than to place a man where all the land is 
appropriated as the property of other people and to tell 
him that he is a free man, at liberty to work for htmself 
and to enjoy his own earnings. That is the situation in 
which our Englishman finds himself. He is just as free 
as he would be were he suspended over a precipice while 
somebody else held a sharp knife to the rope ; just as free 
as if thirsting in a desert he found the only spring for 
miles walled and guarded by armed men who told him he 
could not drink unless he freely contracted with them on 
their terms. Had this Englishman lived generations ago, 
in the time of his Saxon ancestors, he would, when he 
became of age, and had taken a wife, have been allotted 
his house-plot and his seed-plot ; he would have had an 
equal share in the great fields which the villagers cultivated 
together, he would have been free to gather his fagots or 
take game in the common wood, or to graze his beasts on 
the common pasturage. Even a few generations ago, after 
the land-grabbing that began with the Tudors had gone 
on for some centuries, he would have found in yet existing 
commons some faint survival of the ancient principle that 
this planet was intended for all men, not for some men. 
But now he finds every foot of land inclosed against him. 
The fields which his forefathers tilled, share and share 
alike, are the private property of ^' my lord," who rents it 
out to large farmers on terms so high that, to get ordinary 



100 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

interest on their capital, they must grind the faces of their 
laborers ; the ancient woodland is inclosed by a high wall, 
topped with broken glass, and is patroled by gamekeepers 
with loaded guns and the authority to take any intruder 
before the magistrate, who will send him to prison ; the 
old-time common has become '* my lord's " great park, on 
which his fat cattle graze, and his supple-limbed deer 
daintUy browse. Even the old foot-paths that gave short 
cuts from road to road, through hazel thicket and by 
tinkling brook, are now walled in. 

Yet this '' free-born Englishman," this Briton who never 
shall be a slave, cannot live without land. He must find 
some bit of the earth's surface on which he and his wife 
can rest, which they may call ''home." But, save the 
highroads, there is not as much of their native land as 
they may cover with the soles of their feet, that they can 
use without some other human creature's permission ; and 
on the highroad they would not be suffered to lie down, 
still less to make them a bower of leaves. So, to get living 
space in his native land, our "free-born Englishman" 
must consent to work so many days in the month for one 
of the " owners " of England, or, what amounts to the same 
thing, he must sell his labor, or the fruits of his labor, to 
some third party and pay the " owner " of some particular 
part of the planet for the privilege of living on the planet. 
Having thus sacrificed a part of his labor to get permission 
from another fellow-creature to live, if he can, our "free- 
born Englishman " must next go to work to procure food, 
clothing, etc. But as he cannot get to work without land 
to work on, he is compelled, instead of going to work for 
himself, to sell his labor to those who have land, on such 
terms as they please, and those terms are only enough just 
to support life in the most miserable fashion— that is to 
say, all the produce of his labor is taken from him, and he 
is given back out of it just what the hardest owner would 



THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 101 

be forced to give the slave— enough to support life on. 
He lives in a miserable hovel, with its broken floor on the 
bare ground, and an ill-kept thatch, through which the 
rain comes. He works from morning to night, and his 
wife must do the same ; and their children, as soon almost 
as they can walk, must also go to work, pulling weeds, or 
scaring away crows, or doing such like jobs for the land- 
owner, who graciously lets them live and work on his land. 
Illness often comes, and death too often. Then there is 
no recourse but the parish or " My Lady Bountiful," the 
wife or daughter or almoner of " the God Almighty of the 
countyside," as Tennyson calls him— the owner (if not 
1;lie maker) of the world in these parts— who doles out in 
insulting and degrading charity some little stint of the 
wealth appropriated from the labor of this family and of 
other such families. If he does not ^' order himseK lowly 
and reverently to all his betters ; " if he does not pull his 
poor hat off his sheepish head whenever ''my lord" or 
" my lady," or '' his honor," or any of their understrappers, 
go by ; if he does not bring up his children in the humility 
which these people think proper and becoming in the 
"lower classes;" if there is suspicion that he may have 
helped himself to an apple or snared a hare, or slyly 
hooked a fish from the stream, this " free-born English- 
man " loses charity and loses work. He must go on the 
parish or starve. He becomes bent and stiff before his 
time. His wife is old and worn, when she ought to be in 
her prime of strength and beauty. His girls— such as live 
— marry such as he, to lead such lives as their mother's, 
or, perhaps, are seduced by their " betters," and sent, with 
a few pounds, to a great town, to die in a few years in 
brothel, or hospital, or prison. His boys grow up ignorant 
and brutish ; they cannot support him when he grows old, 
even if they would, for they do not get back enough of the 
proceeds of their labor. The only refuge for the pair in 



102 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

their old age is the almshouse, where, for shame to let them 
starve on the roadside, these worked-out slaves are kept 
to die,— where the man is separated from the wife, and the 
old couple, over whom the parson of the church, by law 
established, has said, "Whom God hath joined together 
let no man put asunder," lead, apart from each other, a 
prison-like existence until death comes to their relief. 

In what is the condition of such a " free-born English- 
man " as this, better than that of a slave ? Yet if this is 
not a fair picture of the condition of the English agricul- 
tural laborers, it is only because I have not dwelt upon 
the darkest shades— the sodden ignorance and brutality, 
the low morality of these degraded and debased classes. 
In quantity and quality of food, in clothing and housing, 
in ease and recreation, and in morality, there can be no 
doubt that the average Southern slave was better off than 
the average agricultural laborer is in England to-day — 
that his life was healthier and happier and fuller. So long 
as a plump, well-kept, hearty negro was worth $1000, no 
slave-owner, selfish or cold-blooded as he might be, would 
keep his negroes as great classes of "free-born English- 
men " must live. But these white slaves have no money 
value. It is not the labor, it is the land that commands 
the labor, that has a capitalized value. You can get the 
labor of men for from nine to twelve shillings a week — 
less than it would cost to keep a slave in good marketable 
condition 5 and of children for sixpence a week, and when 
they are worked out they can be left to die or " go on the 
parish." 

The negroes, some say, are an inferior race. But these 
white slaves of England are of the stock that has given 
England her scholars and her poets, her philosophers and 
statesmen, her merchants and inventors, who have formed 
the bulwark of the sea-girt isle, and have carried the meteor 
flag around the world. They are ignorant, and degraded, 



THE EIGHTS OF MAN. 103 

and debased ; they live the life of slaves and die the death 
of paupers, simply because they are robbed of their natural 
rights. 

In the same neighborhood in which you may find such 
people as these, in which you may see squalid laborers' 
cottages where human beings huddle together Kke swine, 
you may also see grand mansions set in great, velvety, 
oak-graced parks, the habitations of local " Grod Almight- 
ies," as the Laureate styles them, and as these brutalized 
English people seem almost to take them to be. They 
never do any work — they pride themselves upon the fact 
that for hundreds of years their ancestors have never done 
any work ; they look with the utmost contempt not merely 
upon the man who works, but even upon the man whose 
grandfather had to work. Yet they live in the utmost 
luxury. They have town houses and country houses, 
horses, carriages, liveried servants, yachts, packs of 
hounds ; they have all that wealth can command in the 
way of literature and education and the culture of travel. 
And they have wealth to spare, which they can invest in 
railway shares, or public debts, or in buying up land in 
the United States. But not an iota of this wealth do they 
produce. They get it because, it being conceded that they 
own the land, the people who do produce wealth must 
hand their earnings over to them. 

Here, clear and plain, is the beginning and primary 
cause of that inequality in the distribution of wealth 
which, in England, produces such dire, soul-destroying 
poverty, side by side with such wantonness of luxury, 
and which is to be seen in the cities even more glaringly 
than in the country. Here, clear and plain, is the reason 
why labor seems a drug, and why, in all occupations in 
which mere laborers can engage, wages tend to the merest 
pittance on which life can be maintained. Deprived of 
their natural rights to land, treated as intruders upon 



104 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

God's earth, men are compelled to an unnatural competi- 
tion for the privilege of mere animal existence, that in 
manufacturing towns and city slums reduces humanity to 
a depth of misery and debasement in which beings, created 
in the image of God, sink below the level of the brutes. 

And the same inequality of conditions which we see 
beginning here, is it not due to the same primary cause ? 
American citizenship confers no right to American soil. 
The first and most essential rights of man— the rights to 
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness— are denied here 
as completely as in England. And the same results must 
foUow. 



CHAPTER XI. 

DUMPING GARBAGE. 

rilHIS gulf-stream of humanity that is setting on our 
JL shores with increasing volume is in all respects 
worthy of more attention than we give it. In many ways 
one of the most important phenomena of our time, it is 
one which forcibly brings to the mind the fact that we are 
living under conditions which must soon begin to change 
rapidly. But there is one part of the immigration coming 
to us this year which is specially suggestive. A number 
of large steamers of the trans-Atlantic lines are calling, 
under contract with the British government, at small ports 
on the west coast of Ireland, filling up with men, women 
and children, whose passages are paid by their govern- 
ment, and then, ferrying them across the ocean, are 
dumping them on the wharves of New York and Boston 
with a few dollars apiece in their pockets to begin life in 
the New World. 

The strength of a nation is in its men. It is its people 
that make a country great and strong, produce its wealth, 
and give it rank among other countries. Yet, here is a, 
civilized and Christian government, or one that passes for 
such, shipping off its people, to be dumped upon another 
continent, as garbage is shipped off from New York to be 
dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Nor are these people 
undesirable material for the making of a nation. What- 
ever they may sometimes become here, when cooped up 



106 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

in tenement-houses and exposed to the corruption of our 
politics, and to the temptation of a life greatly differing 
from that to which they have been accustomed, they are 
in their own country, as any one who has been among 
them there can testify, a peaceable, industrious, and, in 
some important respects, a peculiarly moral people, who 
lack intellectual and pohtical education, and the robust 
virtues that personal independence alone can give, simply 
because of the poverty to which they are condemned. Mr. 
Trevelyan, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, has declared 
in the House of Commons that they are physically and 
morally healthy, well capable of making a living, and yet 
the government of which he is a member is shipping them 
away at public expense as New York ships its garbage ! 

These people are well capable of making a living, Mr. 
Trevelyan says, yet if they remain at home they will be 
able to make only the poorest of poor livings in the best 
of times, and when seasons are not of the best, taxes must 
be raised and alms begged to keep them alive ; and so as 
the cheapest way of getting rid of them, they are shipped 
away at public expense. 

What is the reason of this ? Why is it that people, in 
themselves well capable of making a living, cannot make 
a living for themselves in their own country? Simply 
that the natural, equal, and unalienable rights of man, 
with which, as asserted by our Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, these human beings have been endowed by their 
Creator, are denied them. The famine, the pauperism, the 
misgovernment and turbulence of Ireland, the bitter 
wrongs which keep aglow the fire of Irish " sedition," and 
the difficulties with regard to Ireland which perplex 
English statesmen, all spring from what the National 
Assembly of France, in 1789, declared to be the cause of 
all public misfortunes and corruptions of government — 
the contempt of human rights. The Irish peasant is 



DUMPING GARBAGE. 107 

forced to starve, to beg, or to emigrate ; lie becomes in the 
eyes of those who rule him mere human garbage, to be 
shipped off and dumped anywhere, because, like the Eng- 
lish peasant, who, after a slave's life, dies a pauper's death, 
his natural rights in his native soil are denied him ; because 
his unalienable right to procure wealth by his own exer- 
tions and to retain it for his own uses is refused him. 

The country from which these people are shipped— and 
the government-aided emigration is as nothing compared 
to the voluntary emigration— is abundantly capable of 
maintaining in comfort a very much larger population 
than it has ever had. There is no natural reason why in 
it people themselves capable of making a living should 
suffer want and starvation. The reason that they do is 
simply that they are denied natural opportunities for the 
employment of their labor, and that the laws permit others 
to extort from them the proceeds of such labor as they 
are permitted to do. Of these people who are now being 
sent across the Atlantic by the English government, and 
dumped on our wharves with a few dollars in their 
pockets, there are probably none of mature years who have 
not by their labor produced wealth enough not only to 
have supported them hitherto in a much higher degree of 
comfort than that in which they have lived, but to have 
enabled them to pay their own passage across the Atlantic, 
if they wanted to come, and to have given them on landing 
here a capital sufficient for a comfortable start. They are 
penniless only because they have been systematically 
robbed from the day of their birth to the day they left 
their native shores. 

A year ago I traveled through that part of Ireland from 
which these government-aided emigrants come. What 
surprises an American at first, even in Connaught, is the 
apparent sparseness of population, and he wonders if this 
can indeed be that overpopulated Ireland of which he has 



108 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

heard so mucli. There is plenty of good land, but on it 
are only fat beasts, and sheep so clean and white that you 
at first think that they must be washed and combed every 
morning. Once this soil was tilled and was populous, but 
now you will find only traces of ruined hamlets, and here 
and there the miserable hut of a herd, who lives in a way 
no Tierra del Fuegan could envy. I^or the " owners " of 
this land, who live in London and Paris, many of them 
never having seen their estates, find cattle more profitable 
than men, and so the men have been driven off. It is only 
when you reach the bog and the rocks, in the mountains 
and by the sea-shore, that you find a dense population. 
Here they are crowded together on land on which Nature 
never intended men to live. It is too poor for grazing, so 
the people who have been driven from the better land are 
allowed to live upon it— as long as they pay their rent. 
If it were not too pathetic, the patches they call fields 
would make you laugh. Originally the surface of the 
ground must have been about as susceptible of cultivation 
as the surface of Broadway. But at the cost of enormous 
labor the small stones have been picked off and piled up, 
though the great boulders remain, so that it is impossible 
to use a plow ; and the surface of the bog has been cut 
away, and manured by seaweed brought from the shore 
on the backs of men and women, till it can be made to 
grow something. 

For such patches of rock and bog— soil it could not be 
called, save by courtesy— which have been made to pro- 
duce anything only by their unremitting toil — these 
people are compelled to pay their absentee landlords rents 
varying from £1 to £4 per acre, and then they must 
pay another rent for the seaweed, which the surf of the 
wild Atlantic throws upon the shore, before they are per- 
mitted to take it for manure, and another rent still for 
the bog from which they cut their turf. As a matter of 



DUMPING GAEBAGE. 109 

fact, these people have to pay more for the land than they 
can get out of the land. They are really forced to pay 
not merely for the use of the land and for the use of the 
ocean, but for the use of the air. Their rents are made 
up, and they manage to live in good times, by the few 
shillings earned by the women, who knit socks as they 
carry their creels to and from the market or sea-shore ; by 
the earnings of the men, who go over to England every 
year to work as harvesters ; or by remittances sent home 
by husbands or children who have managed to get to 
America. In spite of their painful industry the poverty 
of these people is appalling. In good times they just 
manage to keep above the starvation line. In bad times, 
when a blight strikes their potatoes, they must eat seaweed, 
or beg relief from the poor-rates, or from the charitable 
contributions of the world. "When so rich as to have a few 
chickens or a pig, they no more think of eating them than 
Vanderbilt thinks of eating his $50,000 trotters. They 
are sold to help pay the rent. In the loughs you may see 
fat salmon swimming in from the sea ; but, if every one 
of them were marked by nature with the inscription, 
"Lord So-and-So, London, with the compliments of God 
Almighty," they could not be more out of the reach of 
these people. The best shops to be found in the villages 
will have for stock a few pounds of sugar and tea weighed 
out into ounce and half -ounce papers, a little flour, two or 
three red petticoats, a little coarse cloth, a few yards of 
flannel, and a few of cotton, some buttons and thread, a 
little pigtail tobacco, and, perhaps, a bottle or two of " the 
native" hid away in the ground some distance from the 
cabin, so that if the police do capture it the shopkeeper 
cannot be put in jail. For the Queen must live and the 
army must be supported, and the great distillers of Dublin 
and Belfast and Cork, who find such a comfortable mo- 
nopoly in the excise, have churches to build and cathedrals 



110 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

to renovate. So poor are these people, so little is there in 
their miserable cabins, that a sub-sheriff who, last year, 
superintended the eviction of near one hundred families in 
one place, declared that the effects of the whole lot were 
not worth £3. 

But the landlords— ah ! the landlords!— they live dif- 
ferently. Every now and again in traveling through this 
country you come across some landlord's palatial home 
mansion, its magnificent grounds inclosed with high walls. 
Pass inside these waUs and it is almost like entering 
another world— wide stretches of rich velvety lawn, beds 
of bright flowers, noble avenues of arching trees, and a 
spacious mansion rich with every appointment of luxury, 
with its great stables, kennels, and appurtenances of every 
kind. But though they may have these luxurious home 
places, the large landlords, with few exceptions, live in 
London or Paris, or pass part of the year in the great cities 
and the rest in Switzerland or Italy or along the shores of 
the Mediterranean ; and occasionally one of them takes a 
trip over here to see our new country, with its magnificent 
opportunities for investing in wild lands which will soon 
be as valuable as English or Irish estates. They do not 
have to work ; their incomes come without work on their 
part— all they have to do is to spend. Some collect gal- 
leries of the most valuable paintings ; some are fanciers of 
old books, and give fabulous prices for rare editions. Some 
of them gamble, some keep studs of racers and costly yachts, 
and some get rid of their money in ways worse than these. 
Even their agents, whose business it is to extort the 
rent from the Irishmen who do work, live luxuriously. 
But it aU comes out of the earnings of just such people 
as are now being dumped on our wharves— out of their 
earnings, or out of what is sent them by relatives in 
America, or by charitable contributions. 

It is to maintain such a system of robbery as this that 
Ireland is filled with policemen and troops and spies and 



DUMPING GARBAGE. Ill 

informers, and a people wlio might be an integral part of 
the British nation are made to that nation a difficulty, a 
■weakness and a danger. Economically, the Irish landlords 
are of no more use than so many great, ravenous, destruc- 
tive beasts— packs of wolves, herds of wild elephants, or 
such dragons as St. George is reported to have killed. They 
produce nothing ; they only consume and destroy. And 
what they destroy is more even than what they consume. 
For, not merely is Ireland turned into a camp of military 
police and red-coated soldiery to hold down the people 
while they are robbed ; but the wealth producers, stripped 
of capital by this robbery of their earnings, and condemned 
by it to poverty and ignorance, are unable to produce the 
wealth which they could and would produce did labor get 
its full earnings, and were wealth left to those who make 
it. Surely true statesmanship would suggest that if any 
one is to be shoveled out of a country it should be those 
who merely consume and destroy ; not those who produce 
wealth. 

But English statesmen think otherwise, and these sur- 
plus Irish men and women ; these garbage Irish men and 
women and little children— surplus and garbage because 
the landlords of Ireland have no use for them, are shoveled 
out of their own country and dumped on our wharves. 
They have reached "the land of the free and the home of 
the brave " just in time for the Fourth of July, when they 
may hear the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing 
assertion of unalienable rights, read again in our annual 
national celebration. 

Have they, then, escaped from the system which in their 
own country made them serfs and human garbage ? Not 
at all. They have not even escaped the power of their old 
landlords to take from them the proceeds of their toil. 

For we are not merely getting these surplus tenants of 
English, Scotch and Irish landlords— we are getting the 
landlords, too. Simultarx^ondTr with this emigration is 



112 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

going on a movement wliicli is making the landlords and 
monopolists of Grreat Britain owners of vast tracts of 
American soil. There is even now scarcely a large land- 
owning family in Great Britain that does not own even 
larger American estates, and American land is becoming 
with them a more and more favorite investment. These 
American estates of "their graces" and "my lords" are 
not as yet as valuable as their home estates, but the natu- 
ral increase in our population, augmented by emigration, 
will soon make them so. 

Every "surplus" Irishman, Englishman or Scotsman 
sent over here assists directly in sending up the value of 
land and the rent of land. The stimulation of emigration 
from the Old Country to this is a bright idea on the part 
of these landlords of two continents. They get rid of 
people whom, at home, in hard times, they might have to 
support in some sort of fashion, and lessen, as they think, 
the forces of disaffection, while at the same time they 
augment the value of their American estates. 

It is not improbable that some of these evicted tenants 
may find themselves over here paying rent to the very 
same landlords to swell whose incomes they have so long 
toiled in their old country ; but whether this be so or not, 
their mere coming here, by its effect in increasing the 
demand for land, helps to enable those landlords to compel 
some others of the people of the United States to give up 
to them a portion of their earnings in return for the 
privilege of living upon American soil. It is merely with 
this view, and for this purpose, that the landlords of the 
Old World are buying so much land in the New. They 
do not want it to live upon ; they prefer to live in London 
or Paris, as many of the privileged classes of America are 
now learning to prefer to live. They do not want to work 
it; they do not propose to work at all. AU they want 
with it is the power, which, as soon as our population 



DUMPING GAEBAGE. 113 

increases a little, its ownership will give, of demanding 
tlie earnings of other people. And nnder present condi- 
tions it is a matter, not of a generation or two, but of only 
a few years, before they will be able to draw from their 
American estates sums even greater than from their Irish 
estates. That is to say, they will virtnally own more 
Americans than they now own Irishmen. 

So far from these Irish immigrants having escaped from 
the system that has impoverished and pauperized the 
masses of the Irish people for the benefit of a few of their 
number, that system has really more unrestricted sway 
here than in Ireland. In spite of the fact that we read 
the Declaration of Independence every Fourth of July, 
make a great noise and have a great jubilation, that first 
of the unalienable rights with which every man is endowed 
by his Creator— the equal right to the use of the natural 
elements without which wealth cannot be produced, nor 
even life maintained— is no better acknowledged with us 
than it is in Ireland. 

There is much said of '' Irish landlordism," as though it 
were a peculiar kind of landlordism, or a peculiarly bad 
kind of landlordism. This is not so. Irish landlordism 
is in nothing worse than Enghsh landlordism, or Scotch 
landlordism, or American landlordism, nor are the Irish 
landlords harder than any similar class. Being generally 
men of education and culture, accustomed to an easy life, 
they are, as a whole, less grasping toward their tenants 
than the farmers who rent of them are to the laborers to 
whom they sub-let. They regard the land as their own, 
that is all, and expect to get an income from it j and the 
agent who sends them the best income they naturally 
regard as the best agent. 

Such popular Irish leaders as Mr. ParneU and Mr. Sul- 
livan, when they come over here and make speeches, have 
a good deal to say about the "feudal landlordism" of 



114 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

Ireland, This is all humbug— an attempt to convey the 
impression that Irish landlordism is something different 
from American landlordism, so that American landowners 
will not take offense, while Irish landowners are denounced. 
There is in Ireland nothing that can be called feudal land- 
lordism. All the power which the Irish landlord has, all 
the tyranny which he exercises, springs from his ownership 
of the soil, from the legal recognition that it is his prop- 
erty. If landlordism in Ii'eland seems more hateful than 
in England, it is only because the industrial organization 
is more primitive, and there are fewer intermediaries 
between the man who is robbed and the man who gets the 
plunder. And if either Irish or English landlordism seems 
more hateful than the same system in America, it is only 
because this is a new country, not yet quite fenced in. 
But, as a matter of law, these "my lords" and "your 
graces," who are now getting themselves far greater estates 
in the United States than they have in their own country, 
have more power as landlords here than there. 

In Ireland, especially, the tendency of legislation for a 
series of years has been to restrain the power of the land- 
lord in dealing with the tenant. In the United States he 
has in all its fullness the unrestricted power of doing as 
he pleases with his own. Rack-renting is with us the 
common, almost the exclusive, form of renting. There is 
no long process to be gone through with to secure an 
eviction, no serving notice upon the relieving officer of 
the district. The tenant whom the landlord wants to 
get rid of can be evicted with the minimum of cost and 
expense. 

Says the Trihme^s "Broadway Lounger" incidentally 
in his chatter : 

Judge Gedney tells me that on the first of this month he signed 
no less than two hundred and fifty warrants of dispossession against 
poor tenants. His district includes many blocks of the most squalid 



DUMPINa GARBAGE. 115 

variety of tenement-hoiises, and he has fully as much unpleasant 
work of this kind as any of his judicial brethren. The first of May 
is, of course, the heaviest field-day of the year for such business, but 
there are generally at the beginning of every month at least one 
hundred warrants granted. And to those who fret about the minor 
miseries of life, no more wholesome cure could be administered than 
an enforced attendance in a district court on such occasions. The 
lowest depths of misery are sounded. Judge Gedney says, too, that 
in the worst cases the suffering is more generally caused by misfor- 
tune than by idleness or dissipation. A man gets a felon on his hand, 
which keeps him at home until his savings are gone and all his elf ects 
are in the pawnshop, and then his children fall sick or his wife dies, 
and the agent of the house, under instructions from the owner, who 
is perhaps in Europe enjojdng himself, won't wait for the rent, and 
serves him with a summons. 

Awhile ago, when it was bitter cold, I read in the 
papers an item telhng how, in the city of Wilkesbarre, 
Pa., a woman and her three children were found one night 
hnddled in a hogshead on a vacant lot, famished and 
almost frozen. The story was a simple one. The man, 
out of work, had tried to steal, and been sent to prison. 
Their rent unpaid, their landlord had evicted them, and 
as the only shelter they knew of, they had gone to the 
hogshead. In Ireland, bad as it is, the relieving officer 
would have had to be by to have offered them at least the 
shelter of the almshouse. 

These Irish men a,nd women who are being dumped on 
our wharves with two or three dollars in their pockets, do 
they find access to nature any freer here than there ? Far 
out in the "West, if they know where to go, and can get 
there, they may, for a little while yet ; but though they 
may see even around New York plenty of unused land, 
they will find that it all belongs to somebody. Let them 
go to work at what they will, they must, here as there, 
give up some of their earnings for the privilege of work- 
ing, and pay some other human creature for the privilege 
of living. On the whole their chances will be better here 



116 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

than there, for tHs is yet a new country, and a century 
ago our settlements only fringed the eastern seaboard of 
a vast continent. But from the Atlantic to the Pacific we 
already have our human garbage, the volume of which 
some of this Irish human garbage will certainly go to swell. 
Wherever you go throughout the country the " tramp " is 
known ; and in this metropolitan city there are already, it 
is stated by the Charity Organization Society, a quarter 
of a million people who live on alms ! What, in a few 
years more, are we to do for a dumping-ground ? Will it 
make our difficulty the less that our human garbage can 
vote? 



CHAPTER XII. 

OVER-PRODUCTION. 

THAT, as declared by the Frencli Assembly, public 
misfortunes and corruptions of government spring 
from ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights, may 
be seen from whatever point we look. 

Consider this matter of " over-production " of which we 
hear so much — to which is so commonly attributed dull- 
ness of trade and the difficulty of finding employment. 
What, when we come to think of it, can be more prepos- 
terous than to speak in any general sense of over-produc- 
tion 1 Over-production of wealth when there is everywhere 
a passionate struggle for more wealth; when so many 
must stint and strain and contrive, to get a living ; when 
there is poverty and actual want among large classes ! 
Manifestly there cannot be over-production, in any general 
and absolute sense, until desires for wealth are all satis- 
fied ; until no one wants more wealth. 

Relative over-production, of course, there may be. The 
production of certain commodities may be so far in excess 
of the proper proportion to the production of other com- 
modities that the whole quantity produced cannot be 
exchanged for enough of those other commodities to give 
the usual returns to the labor and capital engaged in 
bringing them to market. But this relative over-produc- 
tion is merely disproportionate production. It may proceed 



118 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

from increased production of things of one kind, or from 
decreased production of things of other kinds. 

Thus, what we would call an over-production of watches 
— meaning not that more watches had been produced 
than were wanted, but that more had been produced than 
could be sold at a remunerative price— would be purely 
relative. It might arise from an increase in the produc- 
tion of watches, outrunning the ability to purchase 
watches ; or from a decrease in the production of other 
things, lessening the ability to purchase watches. No 
matter how much the production of watches were to 
increase, within the limits of the desire for watches, it 
would not be over-production, if at the same time the 
production of other things increased sufficiently to allow 
a proportionally increased quantity of other things to be 
given for the increased quantity of watches. And no 
matter how much the production of watches might be 
decreased, there would be relative over-production, if at 
the same time the production of other things were de- 
creased in such proportion as to diminish in greater 
degree the ability to give other things for watches. 

In short, desire continuing, the over-production of par- 
ticular commodities can be only relative to the production 
of other commodities, and may result from unduly in- 
creased production in some branches of industry, or from 
the checking of production in other branches. But while 
the phenomena of over-production may thus arise from 
causes directly operating to increase production, or from 
causes directly operating to check production, just as the 
equipoise of a pair of scales may be disturbed by the addi- 
tion or the removal of a weight, there are certain symptoms 
by which we may determine from which of these two 
kinds of causes any disturbance proceeds. For while to 
a limited extent, and in a limited field, these diverse causes 
may produce similar effects, their general effects will be 



OVEE-PEODUCTION. 119 

widely different. The increase of production in any branch 
of industry tends to the general increase of production ; 
the checking of production in any branch of industry 
tends to the general checking of production. 

This may be seen from the different general effects 
which follow increase or diminution of production in the 
same branch of industry. Let us suppose that from the 
discovery of new mines, the improvement of machinery, 
the breaking up of combinations that control it, or any 
other cause, there is a great and rapid increase in the 
production of coal, out of proportion to the increase of 
other production. In a free market the price of coal 
therefore falls. The effect is to enable all consumers of 
coal somewhat to increase their consumption of coal, and 
somewhat to increase their consumption of other things, 
and to stimulate production, by reducing cost, in all those 
branches of industry into which the use of coal directly or 
indirectly enters. Thus the general effect is to increase 
production, and to beget a tendency to reestablish the 
equilibrium between the production of coal and the produc- 
tion of other things, by raising the aggregate production. 

But let the coal operators and syndicates, as they fre- 
quently do, determine to stop or reduce the production of 
coal in order to raise prices. At once a large body of men 
engaged in producing coal find their power of purchasing 
cut off or decreased. Their demand for commodities they 
habitually use thus falls off; demand and production in 
other branches of industry are lessened, and other con- 
sumers, in turn, are obliged to decrease their demands. 
At the same time the enhancement in the price of coal 
tends to increase the cost of production in all branches of 
industry in which coal is used, and to diminish the amount 
both of coal and of other things which the users of coal 
can call for. Tims the check to production is perpetuated 
through all branches of industry, and when the reestablish- 



120 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

ment of equilibrium between the production of coal and 
the production of other things is effected, it is on a 
diminished scale of aggregate production. 

All trade, it is to be remembered, is the exchange of 
commodities for commodities— money being merely the 
measure of values and the instrument for conveniently 
and economically effecting exchanges. Demand (which is 
a different thing from desire, as it involves purchasing 
power) is the asking for things in exchange for an equiva- 
lent value of other things. Supply is the offering of things 
in exchange for an equivalent value of other things. These 
terms are therefore relative ; demand involves supply, and 
supply involves demand. Whatever increases the quan- 
tity of things offered in exchange for other things at once 
increases supply and augments demand. And, reversely, 
whatever checks the bringing of things to market at once 
reduces supply and decreases demand. 

Thus, while the same primary effect upon the relative 
supply of and demand for any particular commodity or 
group of commodities may be caused either by augmenta- 
tion of the supply of such commodities, or by reduction 
in the supply of other commodities — in the one case, the 
general effect will be to stimulate trade, by calling out 
greater supplies of other commodities, and increasing 
aggregate demand ; and in the other case, to depress trade, 
by lessening aggregate demand and diminishing supply. 
The equation of supply and demand between agricultural 
productions and manufactured goods might thus be altered 
in the same direction and to the same extent by such 
prosperous seasons or improvements in agriculture as 
would reduce the price of agricultural productions as 
compared with manufactured goods, or by such restrictions 
upon the production or exchange of manufactured goods 
as would raise their price as compared with agricultural 
productions. But in the one case, the aggregate produce 



OVEE-PEODUCTION. 121 

of the community ■would be increased. There would be 
not only an increase of agricultural products, but the 
increased demand thus caused would stimulate the pro- 
duction of manufactured goods ; while this prosperity in 
manufacturing industries, by enabling those engaged in 
them to increase their demand for agricultural productions, 
would react upon agriculture. In. the other case, the 
aggregate produce would be decreased. The increase in 
the price of manufactured goods would compel farmers to 
reduce their demands, and this would in turn reduce the 
ability of those engaged in manufacturing to demand farm 
products. Thus trade would slacken, and production be 
checked in all directions. That this is so, we may see from 
the different general effects which result from good crops 
and poor crops, though to an individual farmer high prices 
may compensate for a poor yield. 

To recapitulate : Relative over-production may proceed 
from causes which increase, or from causes which diminish, 
production. But increased production in any branch of 
industry tends to increase production in all ; to stimulate 
trade and augment the general prosperity; and any dis- 
turbance of equilibrium thus caused must be speedily 
readjusted. Diminished production in any branch of 
industry, on the other hand, tends to decrease production 
in all ; to depress trade and lessen the general prosperity ; 
and depression thus produced tends to perpetuate itself 
through larger circles, as in one branch of industry after 
another the check to production reduces the power to 
demand the products of other branches of industry. 

Whoever will consider the wide-spread phenomena 
which are currently attributed to over-production can have 
no doubt from which of these two classes of causes they 
spring. He will see that they are symptoms, not of the 
excess of production, but of the restriction and strangula- 
tion of production. 



^22 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

There are with us many restrictions of production, direct 
and indirect; for production, it must be remembered, 
involves the transportation and exchange as well as the 
making of things. And restrictions imposed upon com- 
merce or any of its instruments may operate to discourage 
production as fully as restrictions imposed upon agricul- 
ture or manufactures. The tariff which we maintain for 
the express purpose of hampering our foreign commerce, 
and restricting the free exchange of our own productions 
for the productions of other nations, is in effect a restric- 
tion upon production. The monopolies which we have 
created or permitted to grow up, and which le^y their toll 
upon internal commerce, or by conspiracy and combination 
diminish supply and artificially enhance prices, restrict 
production in the same way ; while the taxes levied upon 
certain manufactures by our internal revenue system 
directly restrict production.* 

So, too, is production discouraged by the direct taxes 

* Whether taxes upon liquor and tobacco can be defended upon 
other grounds is not here in question. What Adam Smith says upon 
this point may, however, be worth quoting : 

"If we consult experience, the cheapness of wine seems to be a 
cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. The inhabitants of the 
wine countries are in general the soberest people in Europe ; witness 
the Spaniards, the Italians, and the inhabitants of the southern prov- 
inces of France. People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their 
daily fare. Nobody affects the character of liberality and good fel- 
lowship, by being profuse of a liquor which is as cheap as small beer. 
On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat 
or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear, and 
a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice, as among the northern na- 
tions, and all those who live between the tropics— the negroes, for 
example, on the coast of Guinea. When a French regiment comes 
from some of the northern provinces of France, where wine is some- 
what dear, to be quartered in the southern, where it is very cheap, 
the soldiers, I have frequently heard it observed, are at first de- 
bauched' by the cheapness and novelty of good wine ; but after a few 



OVER-PRODUCTION. 123 

levied by our States, counties and municipalities, which in 
the aggregate exceed the taxation of the Federal govern- 
ment. These taxes are generally levied upon all property, 
real and personal, at the same rate, and fall partly on land, 
which is not the result of production, and partly on things 
which are the result of production ; but insomuch as build- 
ings and improvements are not only thus taxed, but the 
land so built upon and improved is universally rated at a 
much higher assessment, and generally at a very much 
higher assessment, than unused land of the same quality,* 
even the taxation that falls upon land values largely oper- 
ates as a deterrent to production. 

To produce, to improve, is thus fraught with a penalty. 
We, in fact, treat the man who produces wealth, or accu- 
mulates wealth, as though he had done something which 
public policy calls upon us to discourage. If a house is 
erected, or a steamship or a factory is built, down comes 
the tax-gatherer to fine the men who have done such things. 
If a farmer go upon vacant land, which is adding nothing 

months' residence, the greater part of them become as sober as the 
rest of the inhabitants. Were the duties upon foreign wines, and 
the excises upon malt, beer, and ale, to be taken away all at once, 
it might, in the same manner, occasion in Great Britain a pretty 
general and temporary drunkenness among the middling and inferior 
ranks of people, which would probably be soon followed by a perma- 
nent and almost universal sobriety. At present, drunkenness is by 
no means the vice of people of fashion, or of those who can easily 
afford the most expensive liquors. A gentleman drunk with ale has 
scarce ever been seen among us. The restraints upon the wine trade 
in Great Britain, besides, do not so much seem calculated to hinder 
the people from going, if I may say so, to the ale-house, as from 
going where they can buy the best and cheapest liquor."— Wealth of 
Nations, Book IV., Chapter III. 

* This arises from the widely spread but utterly false notion that 
property should pay taxes only in proportion to the income it yields. 
In Great Britain, this is carried to such a pitch of absurdity that 
unused land pays no taxes, no matter how valuable it may be. 



124 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

to the wealth, of the community, reclaim it, cultivate it, 
cover it with crops, or stock it with cattle, we not only 
make him pay for having thus increased wealth, but, as 
an additional discouragement to the doing of such things, 
we tax him very much more on the value of his land than 
we do the man who holds an equal piece idle. So, too, if 
a man saves, our taxes operate to punish him for his thrift. 
Thus is production checked in every direction. 

But this is not all. There is with us a yet greater check 
to production. 

If there be in this universe superior intelligences 
engaged, with higher powers, in the study of its infinite 
marvels, who sometimes examine the speck we tenant with 
such studious curiosity as our microscopists watch the 
denizens of a drop of water, the manner in which, in such 
a country as this, population is distributed, must greatly 
puzzle them. In our cities they find people packed 
together so closely that they live over one another in 
tiers ; in the country they see people separated so widely 
that they lose aU the advantages of neighborhood. They 
see buUdings going up in the outskirts of our towns, while 
much more available lots remain vacant. They see men 
going great distances to cultivate land while there is yet 
plenty of land to cultivate in the localities from which they 
come and through which they pass. And as these higher 
intelligences watch this process of settlement through 
whatever sort of microscopes they may require to observe 
such creatures as we, they must notice that, for the most 
part, these settlers, instead of being attracted by each 
other, leave between each other large patches of unused 
land. If there be in the universe any societies which have 
the same relation to us as our learned societies have to 
ants and animalculas, these phenomena must lead to no 
end of curious theories. 

Take in imagination such a bird's-eye view of the city 



OVEE-PEODUCTION. 125 

of New York as might be had from a balloon. The houses 
are climbing heavenward — ten, twelve, even fifteen stories, 
tier on tier of people, living, one family above another, 
without sufficient water, without sufficient light or air, 
without playgTound or breathing-space. So close is the 
building that the streets look like narrow rifts in the brick 
and mortar, and from street to street the solid blocks 
stretch until they almost meet ; in the newer districts only 
a space of twenty feet, a mere crack in the masonry 
through which at high noon a sunbeam can scarcely 
struggle down, being left to separate the backs of the 
tenements fronting on one street from the backs of those 
fronting on another street. Yet, around this city, and 
within easy access of its center, there is plenty of vacant 
land ; within the city limits, in fact, not one-half the land is 
built upon ; and many blocks of tall tenement-houses are 
surrounded by vacant lots. If the improvement of our 
telescopes were to show us on another planet, lakes where 
the water, instead of presenting a level surface, ruffled 
only by the action of the wind, stood up here and there in 
huge columns, it could hardly perplex us more than these 
phenomena must perplex such extramundane intelligences 
as I have supposed. How is it, they may well speculate, 
that the pressure of population which piles families, tier 
on tier, above each other, and raises such towering ware- 
houses and workshops, does not cover this vacant land 
with buildings and with homes ? Some restraining cause 
there must be ; but what, it might well puzzle them to tell. 
A South Sea Islander, however— one of the old heathen 
sort, whom, in civilizing, we have well-nigh exterminated, 
might make a guess. If one of their High Chiefs tabooed 
a place or object, no one of the common sort of these 
superstitious savages dare use or touch it. He must go 
around for miles rather than set his feet on a tabooed 
path } must parch or die with thirst rather than drink of 



126 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

a tabooed spring ; must go hungry thougli the fruit of a 
tabooed grove rotted on the ground before his eyes. A 
South Sea Islander would say that this vacant land must 
be ''taboo." And he would be not far from the truth. 
This land is vacant, simply because it is cursed by that 
form of the taboo which we superstitiously venerate under 
the names of "private property" and "vested rights." 

The invisible barrier but for which buildings would rise 
and the city would spread, is the high price of land, a 
price that increases the more certainly it is seen that a 
growing population needs the land. Thus the stronger 
the incentive to the use of land, the higher the barrier 
that arises against its use. Tenement-houses are built 
among vacant lots because the price that must be paid for 
land is so grea.t that people who have not large means must 
economize their use of land by living one family above 
another. 

While in all of our cities the value of land, which 
increases not merely with their growth, but with the 
expectation of growth, thus operates to check building 
and improvement, its effect is manifested through the 
country in a somewhat different way. Instead of unduly 
crowding people together it unduly separates them. The 
expectation of profit from the rise in the value of land 
leads those who take up new land, not to content them- 
selves with what they may most profitably use, but to get 
all the land they can, even though they must let a great 
part of it lie idle; and large tracts are seized upon by 
those who make no pretense of using. any part of it, but 
merely calculate to make a profit out of others who in 
time will be driven to use it. Thus population is scattered, 
not only to loss of all the comforts, refinements, pleasures 
and stimulations that come from neighborhood, but to the 
great loss of productive power. The extra cost of con- 
structing and maip.t9,ining roads and railways, the greater 



O^TEE-PRODUCTIOX. 127 

distances over "^hicli produce and goods must be trans- 
ported, the difficulties "wMch separation interposes to tliat 
commerce bet"u-een men wMch. is necessary' even to tlie 
ruder forms of modern production, all retard and lessen 
production. TVliile just as the high value of land in and 
about a gi-eat city makes more difficult the erection of 
buildings, so does increase in the value of agricultural 
land make improvement difficult. The higher the value 
of land the more capital does the farmer require if he buys 
outright ; or, if he buys on instalments, or rents, the more 
of his earnings must he give up every year. Men who 
"would eagerly improve and cultivate land could it be had 
for the using are thus turned away — to wander long 
distances and waste their means in looking for better 
opportunities; to swell the ranks of those seeking for 
employment as wage-workers ; to go back to the cities or 
manuf actiu'ing villages in the endeavor to make a living ; 
or to remain idle, frequently for long periods, and some- 
times until they become utterly demoralized and worse 
than useless tramps. 

Thus is production checked in those vocations' which 
form the foundation for all o hers. This check to the 
production of some forms of wealth lessens demand for 
other forms of wealth, and so the effect is propagated 
fi"om one branch of industry to another, begetting the 
phenomena that are spoken of as over-production, but 
which are primarily due to restricted production. 

And as land values tend to rise, not merely with the 
gi'owth of population and wealth, but with the expectation 
of that growth, thus enlisting in pushing on the upward 
movement, the powerful and illusive sentiment of hope, 
there is a constant tendency, especially strong in rapidly 
gi'owing countries, to carry ap the price of land beyond 
the point at which labor and capital can profitably engage 
in production, and the only check to this is the refusal of 



128 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

labor and capital so to engage. This tendency becomes 
peculiarly strong in recurring periods, when the fever of 
speculation runs high, and leads at length to a corre- 
spondingly general and sudden check to production, which 
propagating itself (by checking demand) through all 
branches of industry, is the main cause of those paroxysms 
known as commercial or industrial depressions, and which 
are marked by wasting capital, idle labor, stocks of goods 
that cannot be sold without loss, and wide-spread want 
and suffering. It is true that other restrictions upon the 
free play of productive forces operate to promote, intensify 
and continue these dislocations of the industrial system, 
but that here is the main and primary cause I think there 
can be no doubt. 

And this, perhaps, is even more clear : That from what- 
ever cause disturbance of industrial and commercial rela- 
tions may originally come, these periodical depressions 
in which demand and supply seem unable to meet and 
satisfy each other could not become wide-spread and 
persistent did productive forces have free access to land. 
Nothing like general and protracted congestion of capital 
and labor coidd take place were this natural vent open. 
The moment symptoms of relative over-production mani- 
fested themselves in any derivative branch of industry, 
the turning of capital and labor toward those occupations 
which extract wealth from the soil would give relief. 

Thus may we see that those public misfortunes which 
we speak of as '' business stagnation " and " hard times," 
those public misfortunes that in periods of intensity cause 
more loss and suffering than great wars, spring truly from 
our ignorance and contempt of human rights ; from our 
disregard of the equal and unalienable right of all men 
freely to apply to nature for the satisfaction of their needs, 
and to retain for their own uses the fuU fruits of their 
labor. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

UNEMPLOYED LABOR. 

"OW contempt of human rights is the essential ele> 
ment in building up the great fortunes whose growth 
is such a marked feature of our development, we have 
already seen. And just as clearly may we see that from 
the same cause spring poverty and pauperism. The tramp 
is the complement of the millionaire. 

Consider this terrible phenomenon, the tramp— an 
appearance more menacing to the Republic than that of 
hostile armies and fleets bent on destruction. What is 
the tramp ? In the beginning, he is a man able to work, 
and willing to work, for the satisfaction of his needs ; but 
who, not finding opportunity to work where he is, starts 
out in quest of it ; who, failing in this search, is, in a later 
stage, driven by those imperative needs to beg or to steal, 
and so, losing self-respect, loses all that animates and 
elevates and stimulates a man to struggle and to labor ; 
becomes a vagabond and an outcast— a poisonous pariah, 
avenging on society the wrong that he keenly, but vaguely^ 
feels has been done him by society. 

Yet the tramp, known as he is now from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, is only a part of the phenomenon. Behind 
him, though not obtrusive, save in what we call " hard 
times," there is, even in what we now consider normal 
times, a great mass of unemployed labor which is unable, 
unwilling, or not yet forced to tramp, but which bears to 



130 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

the tramp the same relation that the submerged part of 
an iceberg does to that much smaller part which shows 
above the surface. 

The difficulty which so many men who would gladly 
work to satisfy their needs find in obtaining opportunity 
of doing so, is so common as to occasion no surprise, nor, 
save when it becomes particularly intensified, to arouse 
any inquiry. We are so used to it, that although we all 
know that work is in itself distasteful, and that there never 
yet was a human being who wanted work for the sake of 
work, we have got into the habit of thinking and talking 
as though work were in itseK a boon. So deeply is this 
idea implanted in the common mind that we maintain a 
policy based on the notion that the more work we do for 
foreign nations and the less we allow them to do for us, 
the better off we shall be ; and in public and in private 
we hear men lauded and enterprises advocated because 
they " furnish employment ; " while there are many who, 
with more or less definiteness, hold the idea that labor- 
saving inventions have operated injuriously by lessening 
the amount of work to be done. 

Manifestly, work is not an end, but a means ; manifestly, 
there can be no real scarcity of work, which is but the 
means of satisfying material wants, until human wants 
are all satisfied. How, then, shall we explain the obvious 
facts which lead men to think and speak as though work 
were in itself desirable ? 

When we consider that labor is the producer of all 
wealth, the creator of all values, is it not strange that 
labor should experience difficulty in finding employment ? 
The exchange for commodities of that which gives value 
to all commodities, ought to be the most certain and easy 
of exchanges. One wishing to exchange labor for food or 
clothing, or any of the manifold things which labor pro- 
duces, is like one wishing to exchange gold-dust for coin, 



UNEMPLOYED LABOR. 131 

cotton for cloth, or wheat for flour. Nay, this is hardly 
a parallel ; for, as the terms upon which the exchange of 
labor for commodities takes place are usually that the labor 
is first rendered, the man who offers labor in exchange 
generally proposes to produce and render value before 
value is returned to him. 

This being the case, why is not the competition of 
employers to obtain workmen as great as the competition 
of workmen to find employment? Why is it that we 
do not consider the man who does work as the obliging 
party, rather than the man who, as we say, furnishes 
work? 

So it necessarily would be, if in saying that labor is the 
producer of wealth, we stated the whole case. But labor 
is only the producer of wealth in the sense of being the 
active factor of production. For the production of wealth, 
labor must have access to preexisting substance and natural 
forces. Man has no power to bring something out of 
nothing. He cannot create an atom of matter or initiate 
the slightest motion. Vast as are his powers of modify- 
ing matter and utilizing force, they are merely powers of 
adapting, changing, recombining, what previously exists. 
The substance of the hand with which I write these lines, 
as of the paper on which I write, has previously formed 
the substance of other men and other animals, of plants, 
soils, rocks, atmospheres, probably of other worlds and 
other systems. And so of the force which impels my pen. 
All we know of it is that it has acted and reacted through 
what seem to us eternal circlings, and appears to reach 
this planet from the sun. The destruction of matter and 
motion, as the creation of matter and motion, are to us 
unthinkable. 

In the human being, in some mysterious way which 
neither the researches of physiologists nor the specula- 
tions of philosophers enable us to comprehend, conscious, 



132 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

planning intelligence comes into control, for a limited 
time and to a limited extent, of the matter and motion 
contained in the human frame. The power of contracting 
and expanding human muscles is the initial force with 
which the human mind acts upon the material world. 
By the use of this power other powers are utilized, and 
the forms and relations of matter are changed in accor- 
dance with human desire. But how great soever be the 
power of affecting and using external nature which human 
intelligence thus obtains,— and how great this may be we 
are only beginning now to realize,— it is stiU only the 
power of affecting and using what previously exists. 
Without access to external nature, without the power of 
availing himself of her substance and forces, man is not 
merely powerless to produce anything, he ceases to exist 
in the material world. He himself, in physical body at 
least, is but a changing form of matter, a passing mode 
of motion, that must be continually drawn from the 
reservoirs of external nature. 

Without either of the three elements, land, air and 
water, man could not exist ; but he is peculiarly a land 
animal, living on its surface, and drawing from it his 
supplies. Though he is able to navigate the ocean, and 
may some day be able to navigate the air, he can only do 
so by availing himself of materials drawn from land. 
Land is to him the great storehouse of materials and 
reservoir of forces upon which he must draw for his 
needs. And as wealth consists of materials and products 
of nature which have been secured, or modified by human 
exertion so as to fit them for the satisfaction of human 
desires,* labor is the active factor in the production of 

* Ho-wever great be its utility, nothing can be counted as wealth 
unless it requires labor for its production ; nor however much labor 
has been required for its production, can anything retain the char- 
acter of wealtli Jonger thaft it cau gratify desire. 



UNEMPLOYED LABOR. 133 

wealth., but land is the passive factor, without which labor 
can neither produce nor exist. 

All this is so obvious that it may seem like wasting space 
to state it. Yet, in this obvious fact lies the explanation 
of that enigma that to so many seems a hopeless puzzle — 
the labor question. What is inexplicable, if we lose sight 
of man's absolute and constant dependence upon land, is 
clear v/hen we recognize it. 

Let us suppose, as well as we can, human society in a 
world as near as possible like our own, with one essentia^ 
difference. Let us suppose this imaginary world and iit 
inhabitants so constructed that men could support them- 
selves in air, and could from the material of the air pro- 
duce by their labor what they needed for nourishment 
and use. I do not mean to suppose a state of things in 
whicb men might float around like birds in the air or 
fishes in the ocean, supplying the prime necessities of 
animal life from what they could pick up. I am merely 
trying to suppose a state of things in which men as they 
are, were relieved of absolute dependence upon land for a 
standing-place and reservoir of material and forces. We 
will suppose labor to be as necessary as with us, human 
desires to be as boundless as with us, the cumulative power 
of labor to give to capital as much advantage as with us, 
and the division of labor to have gone as far as with us 
— the only difference being (the idea of claiming the air 
as private property not having been thought of) that no 
iWnan creature would be compelled to make terms with 
another in order to get a resting-place, and to obtain 
access to the material and forces without which labor 
cannot produce. In such a state of things, no matter how 
.minute had become the division of labor, no matter bow 
great had become the accumulation of capital, or how far 
labor-saving inventions had been carried, — there could 
never be anything that seemed like an excess of the 



134 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

supply of labor over the demand for labor ; there could 
never be any difficulty in finding employment ; and the 
spectacle of willing men, having in their own brains and 
muscles the power of supplying the needs of themselves 
and their families, yet compelled to beg for work or for 
alms, could never be witnessed. It being in the power of 
every one able to labor to apply his labor directly to the 
satisfaction of his needs without asking leave of any one 
else, that cutthroat competition, in which men who must 
find employment or starve are forced to bid against each 
other, could never arise. 

Variations there might be in the demand for particular 
commodities or services, which would produce variations 
in the demand for labor in different occupations, and cause 
wages in those occupations somewhat to rise above or faU 
below the general level, but the ability of labor to employ 
itseK, the freedom of indefinite expansion in the primary 
employments, would allow labor to accommodate itself to 
these variations, not merely without loss or suffering, but 
so easily that they would be scarcely noticed. For occu- 
pations shade into one another by imperceptible degrees, 
no matter how minute the division of labor — or, rather, 
the more minute the division of labor the more insensible 
the gradation— so that there are in each occupation enough 
who could easily pass to other occupations, readily to allow 
of such contractions and expansions as might in a state of 
freedom occur. The possibility of indefinite expansion in 
the primary occupations, the ability of every one to make 
a living by resort to them, would produce elasticity through- 
out the whole industrial system. 

Under such conditions capital could not oppress labor. 
At present, in any dispute between capital and labor, 
capital enjoys the enormous advantage of being better 
able to wait. Capital wastes when not employed; but 
labor starves. Where, however, labor could always 



UNEMPLOYED LABOR. 135 

employ itself, the disadvantage in any conflict "would be 
on the side of capital, while that surplus of unemployed 
labor which enables capital to make such advantageous 
bargains with labor would not exist. The man who 
wanted to get others to work for him would not find men 
crowding for employment, but, finding all labor already 
employed, would have to offer higher wages, in order to 
tempt them into his emploj^ment, than the men he wanted 
could make for themselves. The competition would be 
that of employers to obtain workmen, rather than that 
of workmen to get employment, and thus the advan- 
tages which the accumulation of capital gives in the 
production of wealth would (save enough to secure the 
accumulation and employment of capital) go ultimately 
to labor. In such a state of things, instead of thinking 
that the man who employed another was doing him a 
favor, we would rather look upon the man who went to 
work for another as the obliging party. 

To suppose that under such conditions there could be 
such inequality in the distribution of wealth as we now 
see, would require a more Adolent presumption than we 
have made in supposing air, instead of land, to be the 
element from which wealth is chiefly derived. But sup- 
posing existing inequalities to be translated into such a 
state, it is evident that large fortunes could avail little, 
and continue but a short time. Where there is always 
labor seeking employment on any terms ; where the masses 
earn only a bare living, and dismissal from employment 
means anxiety and privation, and even beggary or starva- 
tion, these large fortunes have monstrous power. But in 
a condition of things where there was no unemployed 
labor, where every one could make a living for himself and 
family without fear or favor, what could a hundred or 
five hundred millions avail in the way of enabling its 
possessor to extort or tyrannize ? 



136 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

The upper millstone alone cannot grind. That it may 
do so, the nether millstone as well is needed. No amount 
of force will break an egg-shell if exerted on one side 
alone. So capital could not squeeze labor as long as labor 
was free to natural opportunities, and in a world where 
these natural materials and opportunities were as free to 
all as is the air to us, there could be no difficulty in find- 
ing employment, no willing hands conjoined with hungry 
stomachs, no tendency of wages toward the minimum on 
which the worker could barely live. In such a world we 
would no more think of thanking anybody for furnishing 
us employment than we here think of thanking anybody 
for furnishing us with appetites. 

That the Creator might have put us in the kind of world 
I have sought to imagine, as readily as in this kind of a 
world, I have no doubt. Why he has not done so may, 
however, I think, be seen. That kind of a world would 
be best for fools. This is the best for men who will use 
the intelligence with which they have been gifted. Of 
this, however, I shall speak hereafter. What I am now 
trying to do by asking my readers to endeavor to imagine 
a world in which natural opportunities were ''as free as 
air," is to show that the barrier which prevents labor from 
freely using land is the nether millstone against which 
labor is ground, the true cause of the difficulties which are 
apparent through the whole industrial organization. 

But it may be said, as I have often heard it said, "We 
do not all want land ! We cannot all become farmers ! " 

To this I reply that we do all want land, though it may 
be in different ways and in varying degrees. Without 
land no human being can live ; without land no human 
occupation can be carried on. Agriculture is not the only 
use of land. It is only one of many. And just as the 
uppermost story of the tallest building rests upon land as 
truly as the lowest, so is the operative as truly a user of 



UNEMPLOYED LABOR. 137 

land as is the farmer. As all wealth is in the last analysis 
the resultant of land and labor, so is all production in the 
last analysis the expenditure of labor upon land. 

Nor is it true that we could not all become farmers. 
That is the one thing that we might all become. If all 
men were merchants, or taUors, or mechanics, all men 
would soon starve. But there have been, and still exist, 
societies in which all get their living directly from nature. 
The occupations that resort directly to nature are the 
primitive occupations, from which, as society progresses, 
all others are differentiated. No matter how complex the 
industrial organization, these must always remain the 
fundamental occupations, upon which all other occupations 
rest, just as the upper stories of a building rest upon the 
foundation. Now, as ever, '* the farmer feedeth all." And 
necessarily, the condition of labor in these first and widest 
of occupations, determines the general condition of labor, 
just as the level of the ocean determines the level of all its 
arms and bays and seas. Where there is a great demand 
for labor in agriculture, and wages are high, there must 
soon be a great demand for labor, and high wages, in all 
occupations. Where it "is difficult to get employment in 
agriculture, and wages are low, there must soon be a 
difficulty of obtaining employment, and low wages, in all 
occupations. Now, what determines the demand for labor 
and the rate of wages in agriculture is manifestly the 
ability of labor to employ itself— that is to say, the ease 
with which land can be obtained. This is the reason that 
in new countries, where land is easily had, wages, not 
merely in agriculture, but in all occupations, are higher 
than in older countries, where land is hard to get. And 
thus it is that, as the value of land increases, wages faU, 
and the difficulty in finding employment arises. 

This whoever will may see by merely looking around 
him. Clearly the difficulty of finding employment, the 



138 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

fact that in all vocations, as a rule, tlie supply of labor 
seems to exceed the demand for labor, springs from 
difficulties that prevent labor finding employment for 
itself— from the barriers that fence labor off from land. 
That there is a surplus of labor in any one occupation 
arises from the difficulty of finding employment in other 
occupations, but for which the surplus would be immedi- 
ately drained off. When there was a great demand for 
clerks no bookkeeper could suffer for want of employment. 
And so on, down to the fundamental employments which 
directly extract wealth from land, the opening in which of 
opportunities for labor to employ itself would soon drain 
off any surplus in derivative occupations. Not that every 
unemployed mechanic, or operative, or clerk, could or 
would get himself a farm ; but that from all the various 
occupations enough would betake themselves to the land 
to relieve any pressure for employment. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY. 

'OW ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights 
may turn public benefits into public misfortunes 
we may clearly see if we trace the effect of labor-saving 
inventions. 

It is not altogether from a blind dislike of innovation 
that even the more thoughtful and intelligent Chinese set 
their faces against the introduction into their dense popu- 
lation of the labor-saving machinery of Western civiliza- 
tion. They recognize the superiority which in many 
things invention has given us, but to their view this 
superiority must ultimately be paid for with too high a 
price. The Eastern mind, in fact, regards the greater 
powers grasped by Western civilization somewhat as the 
medieval European mind regarded the powers which it 
believed might be gained by the Black Art, but for which 
the user must finally pay in destruction of body and 
damnation of soul. And there is much in the present 
aspects and tendencies of our civihzation to confirm the 
Chinese in this view. 

It is Clear that the inventions and discoveries which 
during this century have so enormously increased the 
power of producing wealth have not proved an unmixed 
good. Their benefits are not merely unequally distributed, 
but they are bringing about absolutely injurious effects. 
They are concentrating capital, and increasing the power 



140 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

of these concentrations to monopolize and oppress; are 
rendering the workman more dependent ; depriving him 
of the advantages of skill and of opportunities to acquire 
it ; lessening his control over his own condition and his 
hope of improving it ; cramping his mind, and in many 
cases distorting and enervating his body. 

It seems to me impossible to consider the present ten- 
dencies of our industrial development without feeling 
that if there be no escape from them, the Chinese philoso- 
phers are right, and that the powers we have called into 
our service must ultimately destroy us. We are reducing 
the cost of production ; but in doing so, are stunting chil- 
dren, and unfitting women for the duties of maternity, 
and degrading men into the position of mere feeders of 
machines. We are not lessening the fierceness of the 
struggle for existence. Though we work with an intensity 
and application that with the great majority of us leaves 
time and power for Kttle else, we have increased, not 
decreased, the anxieties of life. Insanity is increasing, 
suicide is increasing, the disposition to shun marriage is 
increasing. We are developing, on the one side, enormous 
fortunes, but on the other side, utter pariahs. These are 
symptoms of disease for which no gains can compensate. 

Yet it is manifestly wrong to attribute either necessary 
good or necessary evil to the improvements and inventions 
which are so changing industrial and social relations. 
They simply increase power— and power may work either 
good or evil as intelligence controls or fails to control it. 

Let us consider the effects of the introduction of labor- 
saving machinery— or rather, of all discoveries, inventions 
and improvements, that increase the produce a given 
amount of labor can obtain. 

In that primitive state in which the labor of each family 
supplies its wants, any invention or discovery which in- 
creases the power of supplying one of these wants will 



THE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY. 141 

-increase tlie power of supplying all, since tlie labor saved 
in one direction may be expended in other directions. 

When division of labor has taken place, and different 
parts in production are taken by different individuals, the 
gain obtained by any labor-saving improvement in one 
branch of production will, in like manner, be averaged 
with all. If, for instance, improvements be made in the 
weaving of cloth and the working of iron, the effect will 
be that a bushel of grain will exchange for more cloth and 
more iron, and thus the farmer will be enabled to obtain 
the same quantity of all the things he wants with less 
labor, or a somewhat greater quantity with the same labor. 
And so with all other producers. 

Even when the improvement is kept a secret, or the 
inventor is protected for a time by a patent, it is only in 
part that the benefit can be retained. It is the general 
characteristic of labor-saving improvements, after at least 
a certain stage in the arts is reached, that the production 
of larger quantities is necessary to seeui*e the economy. 
And those who have the monopoly are impelled by 
their desire for the largest profit to produce more at a 
lower price, rather than to produce the same quantity at 
the previous price, thus enabling the producers of other 
things to obtain for less labor the particular things in the 
production of which the saving has been effected, and thus 
diffusing part of the benefit, and generally the largest part, 
over the whole field of industry. 

In this way all labor-saving inventions tend to increase 
the productive power of all labor, and, except in so far as 
they are monopolized, their whole benefit is thus diffused. 
For, if in one occupation labor become more profitable 
than in others, labor is drawn to it until the net average 
in different occupations is restored. And so, where not 
artificially prevented, does the same tendency bring to a 
common level the earnings of capital, The direct effect 



142 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

of improvements and inventions which add to productive 
power is, it is to be remarked, always to increase the earn- 
ings of labor, never to increase the earnings of capital. 
The advantage, even in such improvements as may seem 
primarily to be rather capital-saving than labor-saving — 
as, for instance, an invention which lessens the time 
required for the tanning of hides — becomes a property 
and advantage of labor. The reason is, not to go into a 
more elaborate explanation, that labor is the active factor 
in production. Capital is merely its tool and instrument. 
The great gains made by particular capitalists in the 
utilization of improvements, are not the gains of capital, 
but generally the gains of monopoly, though sometimes 
they may be gains of adventure or of management. The 
rate of interest, which is the measure of the earnings of 
capital, has not increased with all the enormous labor- 
saving improvements of our century ; on the contrary, its 
tendency has been to diminish. But the requirement of 
larger amounts of capital, which is generally characteristic 
of labor-saving improvements, may increase the facility 
with which those who have large capitals can establish 
monopolies that enable them to intercept what would 
naturally go to labor. This, however, is an effect, rather 
than a cause, of the failure of labor to get the benefit of 
improvements in production. 

For the cause we must go further. While labor-saving 
improvements increase the power of labor, no improve- 
ment or invention can release labor from its dependence 
upon land. Labor-saving improvements only increase the 
power of producing wealth from land. And land being 
monopolized as the private property of certain persons, 
who can thus prevent others from using it, aU these gains, 
which accrue primarily to labor, can be demanded from 
labor by the owners of land, in higher rents and higher 
prices, Thus, as we see it, the march of improvement and 



THE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY. 143 

invention has increased neither interest nor wages, but its 
general effect has everywhere been to increase the value 
of land. Where increase of wages has been won, it has 
been by combination, or the concurrence of special causes ; 
but what of the increased productiveness which primarily 
attaches to labor has been thus secured by labor is com- 
paratively trivial. Some part of it has gone to various 
other monopolies, but the great bulk has gone to the 
monopoly of the soil, has increased ground-rents and 
raised the value of land. 

The railroad, for instance, is a great labor-saving 
invention. It does not increase the quantity of grain 
which the farmer can raise, nor the quantity of goods 
which the manufacturer can turn out; but by reducing 
the cost of transportation it increases the quantity of all 
the various things which can be obtained in exchange for 
produce of either kind ; which practically amounts to the 
same thing. 

These gains primarily accrue to labor; that is to say, 
the advantage given by the raih-oad in the district which 
it affects, is to save labor; to enable the same labor to 
procure more wealth. But as we see where railroads are 
built, it is not labor that secures the gain. The railroad 
being a monopoly— and in the United States, a practically 
unrestricted monopoly— as large a portion as possible of 
these gains, over and above the fair returns on the capital 
invested, is intercepted by the managers, who by fictitious 
costs, watered stock, and in various other ways, thinly 
disguise their levies, and who generally rob the stock- 
holders while they fleece the public. The rest of the gain 
— the advantage which, after these deductions, accrues to 
labor— is intercepted by the monopolists of land. As the 
productiveness of labor is increased, or even as there is a 
promise of its increase, so does the value of land increase, 
and labor, having to pay proportionately more for land. 



144 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

is shorn of all tlie benefit. Taught by experience, when a 
railroad opens a new district we do not expect wages to 
increase ; what we expect to increase is the value of land. 

The elevated railroads of New York are great labor- 
saving machines, which have greatly reduced the time and 
labor necessary to take people from one end of the city to 
the other. They have made accessible to the overcrowded 
population of the lower part of the island, the vacant 
spaces at the upper. But they have not added to the 
earnings of labor, nor made it easier for the mere laborer 
to live. Some portion of the gain has been intercepted 
by Mr. Cyrus Field, Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, Mr. Jay Grould, 
and other managers and manipulators. Over and above 
this, the advantage has gone to the owners of land. The 
reduction in the time and cost of transportation has made 
much vacant land accessible to an overcrowded population, 
but as this land has been made accessible, so has its value 
risen, and the tenement-house population is as crowded as 
ever. The managers of the roads have gained some mil- 
lions ; the owners of the land affected, some hundreds of 
millions; but the working-classes of New York are no 
better off. What they gain in improved transportation 
they must pay in increased rent. 

And so would it be with any improvement or material 
benefaction. Supposing the very rich men of New York 
were to become suddenly imbued with that public spirit 
which shows itself in the Astor Library and the Cooper 
Institute, and that it should become among them a passion, 
leading them even to beggar themselves in the emulation 
to benefit their fellow-citizens. Supposing such a man as 
Mr. Gould were to make the elevated roads free, were to 
assume the cost of the Fire Department, and give every 
house a free telephone connection; and Mr. VanderbUt, 
not to be outdone, were to assume the cost of putting 
down good pavements, and cleaning the streets, and run- 



THE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY. 145 

ning the horse-cars for nothing ; while the Astors were to 
\>uild libraries in every ward. Supposing the fifty, twenty, 
ten, and still smaller millionaires, seized by the same pas- 
sion, were singly or together, at their own cost, to bring 
in plentiful supplies of water; to furnish heat, light and 
power free of charge; to improve and maintain the 
schools ; to open theaters and concerts to the public ; to 
establish public gardens and baths and m-arkets ; to open 
stores where everything could be bought at retail for the 
lowest wholesale price;— in short, were to do everything 
that could be done to make New York a cheap and pleasant 
place to live in ? The result would be that New York being 
so much more desirable a place to live in, more people 
would desire to hve in it, and the landowners could charge 
so much the more for the privilege. All these benefactions 
would increase rent. 

And so, whatever be the character of the improvement, 
its benefit, land being monopolized, must ultimately go to 
the owners of land. Were labor-saving invention carried 
so far that the necessity of labor in the production of 
wealth were done away with, the result would be that the 
owners of land could command all the wealth that could 
be produced, and need not share with labor even what is 
necessary for its maintenance. Were the powers and 
capacities of land increased, the gain would be that of 
landowners. Or were the improvement to take place in 
the powers ^nd capacities of labor, it would still be the 
owners of land, not laborers, who would reap the advan- 
tage. 

For land being indispensable to labor, those who monopo- 
hze land are able to make their own terms with labor ; or 
rather, the competition with each other of those who cannot 
employ themselves, yet must find employment or starve, 
will force wages down to the lowest point at which the 
habits of the laboring-class permit them to live and repro- 



146 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

duce. At this point, in all countries where land is fully 
monopolized, the wages of common labor must rest, and 
toward it all other wages tend, being kept up above it 
only by the special conditions, artificial or otherwise, which 
give labor in some occupations higher wages than in 
others. And so no improvement even in the power of 
labor itself— whether it come from education, from the 
actual increase of muscular force, or from the ability to 
do with less sleep and work longer hours — could raise the 
reward of labor above this point. This we see in countries 
and in occupations where the labor of women and children 
is called in to aid the natural breadwinner in the support 
of the family. While as for any increase in economy and 
thrift, as soon as it became general it could only lessen, 
not increase, the reward of labor. 

This is the '4ron law of wages," as it is styled by the 
Germans— the law which determines wages to the mini- 
mum on which laborers will consent to live and reproduce. 
It is recognized by all economists, though by most of them 
attributed to other causes than the true one. It is mani- 
festly an inevitable result of making the land from which 
all must live the exclusive property of some. The lord of 
the soil is necessarily lord of the men who live upon it. 
They are as truly and as fuUy his slaves as though hia 
ownership in their flesh and blood were acknowledged. 
Their competition with each other to obtain from him the 
means of livelihood must compel them to give up to him 
all their earnings save the necessary wages of slavery— to 
wit, enough to keep them in working condition and main- 
tain their numbers. And as no possible increase in the 
power of his labor, or reduction in his expenses of living, 
can benefit the slave, neither can it, where land is monopo- 
lized, benefit those who have nothing but their labor. It 
can only increase the value of land— the proportion of the 
produce that goes to the landowner. And this being the 



THE EFFECTS OF MACHINEEY. 147 

case, the greater employment of machinery, the greater 
division of labor, the greater contrasts in the distribution 
of wealth, become to the working-masses positive evils 
—making their lot harder and more hopeless as material 
progress goes on. Even education adds but to the capacity 
for suffering. If the slave must continue to be a slave, it 
is cruelty to educate him. 

All this we may not yet fully realize, because the 
industrial revolution which began "with the introduction 
of steam, is as yet in its first stages, while up to this time 
the overrunning of a new continent has reduced social 
pressure, not merely here, but even in Europe. But the 
new continent is rapidly being fenced in, and the indus- 
trial revolution goes on faster and faster. 



CHAPTER XV. 

SLAVERY AND SLAVERY. 

I MUST leave it to the reader to carry on in other 
directions, if lie choose, such inquiries as those to 
which the last three chapters have been devoted.* The 
more carefully he examines, the more fully -will he see that 
at the root of every social problem lies a social wrong, 
that " ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights are 
the causes of public misfortunes and corruptions of govern- 
ment." Yet, in truth, no elaborate examination is neces- 
sary. To understand why material progress does not 
benefit the masses requires but a recognition of the self- 
evident truth that man cannot live without land ; that it 
is only on land and from land that human labor can 
produce. 

Robinson Crusoe, as we all know, took Friday as hip 
slave. Suppose, however, that instead of taking Friday 
as his slave, Robinson Crusoe had welcomed him as a man 
and a brother; had read him a Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, an Emancipation Proclamation and a Fifteenth 
Amendment, and informed him that he was a free and 
independent citizen, entitled to vote and hold office ; but 
had at the same time also informed him that that particulai 
island was his (Robinson Crusoe's) private and exclusive 

* They are pursued in more regular and scientific form in 
"Progress and Poverty," a book to which I must refer the reader 
a more el^bgrate discussiou of ec,ouomic questions. 



SLAVERY AND SLAVERY. 149 

property. What would liave been tlie difference ? Since 
Friday could not fly up into the air nor swim off through 
the sea, since if he lived at all he must live on the island, 
he would have been in one case as much a slave as in the 
other. Crusoe's ownership of the island would be equiva- 
lent to his ownership of Friday. 

Chattel slavery is, in fact, merely the rude and primitive 
mode of property in man. It only grows up where popu- 
lation is sparse ; it never, save by virtue of special circum- 
stances, continues w^here the pressure of population gives 
land a high value, for in that case the ownership of land 
gives aU the power that comes from the ownership of men, 
in more convenient form. When in the course of history 
we see the conquerors making chattel slaves of the con- 
quered, it is always where population is sparse and land 
of little value, or where they want to carry off their human 
spoil. In other cases, the conquerors merely appropriate 
the lands of the conquered, by which means they just as 
effectually, and much more conveniently, compel the con- 
quered to work for them . It was not until the great estates 
of the rich patricians began to depopulate Italy that the 
importation of slaves began. In Turkey and Egypt, where 
chattel slavery is yet legal, it is confined to the inmates 
and attendants of harems. English ships carried negro 
slaves to America, and not to England or Ireland, because 
in America land was cheap and labor was valuable, while 
in western Europe land was valuable and labor was cheap. 
As soon as the possibility of expansion over new land 
ceased, chattel slavery would have died out in our Southern 
States. As it is. Southern planters do not regret the aboli- 
tion of slavery. They get out of the freedmen as tenants 
as much as they got out of them as slaves. While as for 
predial slavery— the attachment of serfs to the soil— the 
form of chattel slavery which existed longest in Europe, 
it is only of use to the proprietor where there is little 



150 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

competition for land. Neither predial slavery nor absolute 
chattel slavery could have added to the Irish landlord's 
virtual ownership of men— to his power to make them 
work for him without return. Their own competition for 
the means of livelihood insured him aU they possibly could 
give. To the English proprietor the ownership of slaves 
would be only a burden and a loss, when he can get 
laborers for less than it would cost to maintain them as 
slaves, and when they are become ill or infirm can turn 
them on the parish. Or what would the New England 
manufacturer gain by the enslavement of his operatives ? 
The competition with each other of so-called freemen, who 
are denied aU right to the soil of what is called their 
country, brings him labor cheaper and more conveniently 
than would chattel slavery. 

That a people can be enslaved just as effectually by 
making property of their lands as by making property of 
their bodies, is a truth that conquerors in all ages have 
recognized, and that, as society developed, the strong and 
unscrupulous who desired to live off the labor of others, 
have been prompt to see. The coarser form of slavery, in 
which each particular slave is the property of a particular 
owner, is fitted only for a rude state of society, and with 
social development entails more and more care, trouble 
and expense upon the owner. But by making property 
of the land instead of the person, much care, supervision 
and expense are saved the proprietors; and though no 
particular slave is owned by a particular master, yet the 
one class still appropriates the labor of the other class as 
before. 

That each particular slave should be owned by a par- 
ticular master would in fact become, as social development 
went on, and industrial organization grew complex, a 
manifest disadvantage to the masters. They would be 
at the trouble of whipping, or otherwise compelling the 



SLAVERY AND SLAVERY. 151 

slaves to work; at tlie cost of watching them, and of 
keeping them when ill or unproductive ; at the trouble of 
finding work for them to do, or of hiring them out, as at 
different seasons or at different times, the number of 
slaves which different owners or different contractors 
could advantageously employ would vary. As social 
development went on, these inconveniences might, were 
there no other way of obviating them, have led slave- 
owners to adopt some such device for the joint ownership 
and management of slaves, as the mutual convenience of 
capitalists has led to in the management of capital. In a 
rude state of society, the man who wants to have money 
ready for use must hoard it, or, if he travels, carry it with 
him. The man who has capital must use it himself or 
lend it. But mutual convenience has, as society developed, 
suggested methods of saving this trouble. The man who 
wishes to have his money accessible turns it over to a 
bank, which does not agree to keep or hand him back 
that particular money, but money to that amount. And 
so by turning over his capital to savings-banks or trust 
companies, or by buying the stock or bonds of corporations, 
he gets rid of all trouble of handling and employing it. 
Had chattel slavery continued, some similar device for the 
ownership and management of slaves would in time have 
been adopted. But by changing the form of slavery — by 
freeing men and appropriating land— all the advantages 
of chattel slavery can be secured without any of the dis- 
advantages which in a complex society attend the owning 
of a particular man by a particular master. 

Unable to employ themselves, the nominally free la- 
borers are forced by their competition with each other to 
pay as rent all their earnings above a bare living, or to 
sell their labor for wages which give but a bare living ; and 
as landowners the ex-slaveholders are enabled as before, 
to appropriate to themselves the labor or the produce of 



152 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

the labor of their former chattels, having in the value 
which this power of appropriating the proceeds of labor 
gives to the ownership of land, a capitalized value equiva- 
lent, or more than equivalent, to the value of their slaves. 
They no longer have to drive their slaves to work ; want 
and the fear of want do that more effectually than the 
lash. They no longer have the trouble of looking out for 
their employment or hiring out their labor, or the expense 
of keeping them when they cannot work. That is thrown 
upon the slaves. The tribute that they still wring from 
labor seems like voluntary payment. In fact, they take it 
as their honest share of the rewards of production— since 
they furnish the land ! And they find so-called political 
economists, to say nothing of so-called preachers of Chris- 
tianity, to tell them it is so. 

We of the United States take credit for having abolished 
slavery. Passing the question of how much credit the 
majority of us are entitled to for the abolition of negro 
slavery, it remains true that we have abolished only one 
form of slavery— and that a primitive form which had 
been abolished in the greater portion of the country by 
social development, and that, notwithstanding its race 
character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have 
been abolished in the same way in other parts of the 
country. We have not really abolished slavery ; we have 
retained it in its most insidious and wide-spread form— in 
a form which applies to whites as to blacks. So far from 
having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, 
and we make no scruple of selling into it our own children 
—the citizens of the Republic yet to be. For what else are 
we doing in selling the land on which future citizens must 
Hve, if they are to live at all ? 

The essence of slaverj^ is the robbery of labor. It con- 
sists in compelling men to work, yet taking from them aU 
the produce of their labor except what suffices for a bare 



SLAVERY AND SLAVERY. 153 

living. Of how many of our ^' free and equal American 
citizens " is that ah-eady the lot ? And of how many more 
is it coming to be the lot ? 

In all our cities there are, even in good times, thousands 
and thousands of men who would gladly go to work for 
wages that would give them merely board and clothes 
— that is to say, who would gladly accept the wages of 
slaves. As I have previously stated, the Massachusetts 
Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Illinois Bureau of 
Labor Statistics both declare that in the majority of 
cases the earnings of wage-workers will not maintain 
their families, and must be pieced out by the earnings of 
women and children. In our richest States are to be 
found men reduced to a virtual peonage — living in their 
employers' houses, trading at their stores, and for the most 
part unable to get out of their debt from one year's end 
to the other. In New York, shirts are made for thirty-five 
cents a dozen, and women working from fourteen to six- 
teen hours a day average three doUars or four dollars a 
week. There are cities where the prices of such work are 
lower still. As a matter of doUars and cents, no master 
could afford to work slaves so hard and keep them so cheaply. 

But it may be said that the analogy between our indus- 
trial system and chattel slavery is only supported by the 
consideration of extremes. Between those who get but 
a bare living and those who can live luxuriously on the 
earnings of others, are many gradations, and here lies the 
great middle class. Between all classes, moreover, a con- 
stant movement of individuals is going on. The million- 
aire's grandchildren may be tramps, while even the poor 
man who has lost hope for himself may cherish it for his 
son. Moreover, it is not true that all the difference 
between what labor fairly earns and what labor really gets 
goes to the owners of land. And with us, in the United 
States, a great many of the owners of land are small 



154 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

owners— men wlio own tlie homesteads in whicli they live 
or the soil which they till, and who combine the characters 
of laborer and landowner. 

These objections will be best met by endeavoring to 
imagine a well-developed society, like our own, in which 
chattel slavery exists without distinction of race. To do 
this requires some imagination, for we know of no such 
case. Chattel slavery had died out in Europe before 
modern civilization began, and in the New World has 
existed only as race slavery, and in communities of low 
industrial development. 

But if we do imagine slavery without race distinction in 
a progressive community, we shall see that society, even 
if starting from a point where the greater part of the 
people were made the chattel slaves of the rest, could not 
long consist of but the two classes, masters and slaves. 
The indolence, interest and necessity of the masters 
would soon develop a class of intermediaries between the 
completely enslaved and themselves. To supervise the 
labor of the slaves, and to keep them in subjection, it 
would be necessary to take, from the ranks of the slaves, 
overseers, policemen, etc.. and to reward them by more of 
the produce of slave labor than goes to the ordinary slave. 
So, too, would it be necessary to draw out special skill 
and talent. And in the course of social development a 
class of traders would necessarily arise, who, exchanging 
the products of slave labor, would retain a considerable 
portion ; and a class of contractors, who, hiring slave labor 
from the masters, would also retain a portion of its prod- 
uce. Thus, between the slaves forced to work for a bare 
living and the masters who lived without work, interme- 
diaries of various grades would be developed, some of 
whom would doubtless acquire large wealth. 

And in the mutations of fortune, some slaveholders 
would be constantly falling into the class of intermediaries, 



SLAVEEY AND SLAVERY. 155 

and finally into the class of slaves, while individual slaves 
would be rising. The conscience, benevolence or gratitude 
of masters would lead them occasionally to manumit 
slaves ; their interest would lead them to reward the dili- 
gence, inventiveness, fidelity to themselves, or treachery 
to their fellows, of particular slaves. Thus, as has often 
occurred in slave countries, we would find slaves who were 
free to make what they could on condition of paying so 
much to their masters every month or every quarter; 
slaves who had partially bought their freedom, for a day 
or two days or three days in the week, or for certain 
months in the year, and those who had completely bought 
themselves, or had been presented with their freedom. 
And, as has always happened where slavery had not race 
character, some of these ex-slaves or their children would, 
in the constant movement, be always working their way 
to the highest places, so that in such a state of society the 
apologists of things as they are would triumphantly point 
to these examples, saying, " See how beautiful a thing is 
slavery ! Any slave can become a slaveholder himself if 
he is only faithful, industrious and prudent ! It is only 
their own ignorance and dissipation and laziness that 
prevent all slaves from becoming masters ! " And then 
they would indulge in a moan for human nature. '^ Alas ! " 
they would say, " the fault is not in slavery ; it is in human 
nature"— meaning, of course, other human nature than 
theu: own. And if any one hinted at the abolition of 
slavery, they would charge him with assaiKng the sacred 
rights of property, and of endeavoring to rob poor blind 
widow women of the slaves that were their sole dependence ; 
call him a crank and a communist ; an enemy of man and 
a defier of God ! 

Consider, furthermore, the operation of taxation in an 
advanced society based on chattel slavery ; the effect of 
the establishment of monopolies of manufacture, trade and 



156 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

transportation ; of the creation of public debts, etc., and 
you will see that in reality the social phenomena would be 
essentially the same if men were made property as they 
are under the system that makes land property. 

It must be remembered, however, that the slavery that 
results from the appropriation of land does not come 
suddenly, but insidiously and progressively. Where 
population is sparse and land of little value, the insti- 
tution of private property in land may exist without its 
effects being much felt. As it becomes more and more 
difficult to get land, so will the virtual enslavement of the 
laboring-classes go on. As the value of land rises, more 
and more of the earnings of labor will be demanded for 
the use of land, until finally nothing is left to laborers 
but the wages of slavery— a bare living. 

But the degree as well as the manner in which individ- 
uals are affected by this movement must vary very much. 
Where the ownership of land has been much diffused, 
there will remain, for some time after the mere laborer 
has been reduced to the wages of slavery, a greater body 
of smaller landowners occupying an intermediate position, 
and who, according to the land they hold, and the relation 
which it bears to their labor, may, to make a comparison 
with chattel slavery, be compared, in their gradations, to 
the owners of a few slaves ; to those who own no slaves 
but are themselves free ; or to partial slaves, compelled to 
render service for one, two, three, four or five days in 
the week, but for the rest of the time their own masters. 
As land becomes more and more valuable this class will 
gradually pass into the ranks of the completely enslaved. 
The independent American farmer working with his own 
hands on his own land is doomed as certainly as two thou- 
sand years ago his prototype of Italy was doomed. He must 
disappear, with the development of the private ownership 
of land, as the English yeoman has already disappeared. 



SLAVERY AND SLAVERY. 157 

We have abolished negro slavery in the United States. 
But how small is the real benefit to the slave. George M. 
Jackson writes me from St. Louis, under date of August 
15,1883: 

During the war I served in a Kentucky regiment in the Federal 
army. When the war broke out, my father owned sixty slaves. I 
had not been back to my old Kentucky home for years until a short 
time ago, when I was met by one of my father's old negroes, who 
said to me : "Mas George, you say you sot us free; but 'fore God, 
I'm wus off than when I belonged to your father." The planters, on 
the other hand, are contented with the change. They say: "How 
foolish it was in us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper 
now than when we owned the slaves." How do they get it cheaper? 
Why, in the shape of rents they take more of the labor of the negro 
than they could under slavery, for then they were compelled to return 
him sufficient food, clothing and medical attendance to keep him 
well, and were compelled by conscience and public opinion, as well 
as by law, to keep him when he could no longer work. Now their 
interest and responsibility cease when they have got ail the work out 
of him they can. 

In one of his novels, Capt. Marryat tells of a school- 
master who announced that he had abandoned the use of 
the rod. When tender mothers, tempted by this announce- 
ment, brought their boys to his institution, he was eloquent 
in his denunciations of the barbarism of the rod ; but no 
sooner had the doors closed upon them than the luckless 
pupils found that the master had only abandoned the use 
of the rod for the use of the cane ! Very much like this 
is our abolition of negro slavery. 

The only one of our prominent men who had any glim- 
mering of what was really necessary to the abolition of 
slavery was Thaddeus Stevens, but it was only a glim- 
mering. " Forty acres and a mule " would have been a 
measure of scant justice to the freedmen, and it would for 
a while have given them something of that personal inde- 
pendence which is necessary to freedom. Yet only for a 



158 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

while. In tlie course of time, and as the pressure of popu- 
lation increased, the forty acres would, with the majority 
of them, have been mortgaged and the mule sold, and they 
would soon' have been, as now, competitors for a foothold 
upon the earth and for the means of making a living from 
it. Such a measui'e would have given the freedmen a 
fairer start, and for many of them would have postponed 
the evil day ; but that is all. Land being private property, 
that evil day must come. 

I do not deny that the blacks of the South have in some 
things gained by the abolition of chattel slavery, I wiU 
not even insist that, on the whole, their material condition 
has not been improved. But it must be remembered that 
the South is yet but sparsely settled, and is behindhand 
in industrial development. The continued existence of 
slavery there was partly the effect and partly the cause of 
this. As population increases, as industry is developed, 
the condition of the freedmen must become harder and 
harder. As yet, land is comparatively cheap in the South, 
and there is much not only unused but unclaimed. The 
consequence is, that the freedmen are not yet driven into 
that fierce competition which must come with denser 
population ; there is no seeming surplus of labor seeking 
employment on any terms, as in the North. The freedmen 
merely get a living, as in the days of slavery, and in many 
cases not so good a living ; but still there is little or no 
difficulty in getting that. To compare fairly the new estate 
of the freedmen with the old, we must wait until in popu- 
lation and industrial development the South begins to 
approach the condition of the North. 

But not even in the North (nor, for that matter, even in 
Europe) has that form of slavery which necessarily results 
from the disinheritance of labor by the monopolization of 
land, yet reached its culmination. For the vast area of 
unoccupied land on this continent has prevented the full 



SLAVEEY AND SLAVERY. 159 

effects of modern development from being felt. As it 
becomes more and more difficult to obtain land, so will the 
virtual enslavement of the laboring-classes go on. As the 
value of land rises, more and more of the earnings of 
labor will be demanded for the use of land— that is to say, 
laborers must give a greater and greater portion of their 
time up to the service of the landlord, until, finally, no 
matter how hard they work, nothing is left them but a 
bare living. 

Of the two systems of slavery, I think there can be no 
doubt that upon the same moral level, that which makes 
property of persons is more humane than that which 
results from making private property of land. The cruel- 
ties which are perpetrated under the system of chattel 
slavery are more striking and arouse more indignation 
because they are the conscious acts of indiAdduals. But 
for the suffering of the poor under the more refined system 
no one in particular seems responsible. That one human 
being should be dehberately burned by other human beings 
excites our imagination and arouses our indignation much 
more than the great fire or railroad accident in which a 
hundred people are roasted alive. But this very fact 
permits cruelties that would not be tolerated under the 
one system to pass almost unnoticed under the other. 
Human beings are overworked, are starved, are robbed 
of all the light and sweetness of life, are condemned to 
ignorance and brutishness, and to the infection of physical 
and moral disease ; are driven to crime and suicide, not by 
other individuals, but by iron necessities for which it seems 
that no one in particular is responsible. 

To match from the annals of chattel slavery the horrors 
that day after day transpire unnoticed in the heart of 
Christian civilization it would be necessary to go back to 
ancient slavery, to the chronicles of Spanish conquest in 
the New World, or to stories of the Middle Passage. 



160 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

Tliat chattel slavery is not tlie worst form of slavery we 
know from the fact that in countries where it has prevailed 
irrespective of race distinctions, the ranks of chattel slaves 
have been recruited from the ranks of the free poor, who, 
driven by distress, have sold themselves or their children. 
And I think no one who reads our daily papers can doubt 
that even abeady, in the United States, there are many 
who, did chattel slavery, without race distinction, exist 
among us, would gladly sell themselves or their children, 
and who would really make a good exchange for their 
nominal freedom in doing so. 

We have not abolished slavery. We never can abolish 
slavery, untU we honestly accept the fundamental truth 
asserted by the Declaration of Independence and secure 
to aU the equal and unalienable rights with which they are 
endowed by their Creator. If we cannot or will not do 
that, then, as a matter of humanity and social stability, it 
might be well, would it avail, to consider whether it were 
not wise to amend our constitution and permit poor whites 
and blacks alike to sell themselves and their children to 
good masters. If we must have slavery, it were better in 
the form in which the slave knows his owner, and the heart 
and conscience and pride of that owner can be appealed 
to. Better breed children for the slaves of good. Christian, 
civilized people, than breed them for the brothel or the 
penitentiary. But alas! that recourse is denied. Sup- 
posing we did legalize chattel slavery again, who woula 
buy men when men can be hired so cheaply ? 



CHAPTER XVI. 

PUBLIC DEBTS AND ESTDIRECT TAXATION. 

THE more we examine, tlie more clearly may we see 
that public misfortunes and corruptions of govern- 
ment do spring from neglect or contempt of the natural 
rights of man. 

That, in spite of the progress of civilization, Europe is 
to-day a vast camp, and the energies of the most advanced 
portion of mankind are everywhere taxed so heavily to pay 
for preparations for war or the costs of war, is due to two 
great itiventions, that of indirect taxation and that of 
public debt. 

Both of these devices by which tyrannies are maintained, 
governments are corrupted, and the common people plun- 
dered, spring historically from the monopolization of land, 
and both directly ignore the natural rights of man. Under 
the feudal system the greater part of public expenses was 
defrayed from the rent of land, and the landholders had 
to do the fighting or bear its cost. Had this system been 
continued, England, for instance, would to-day have had 
no public debt. And it is safe to say that her people and 
the world would have been saved those unnecessary 
and cruel wars in which in modern times English blood 
and treasure have been wasted. But by the institution of 
indirect taxes and public debts the great landholders were 
enabled to throw off on the people at large the burdens 
which constituted the condition on which they held their 



162 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

lands, and to throw tliem off in such a way that those on 
whom they rested, though they might feel the pressure, 
could not tell from whence it came. Thus it was that the 
holding of land was insidiously changed from a trust into 
an individual possession, and the masses stripped of the 
first and most important of the rights of man. 

The institution of public debts, like the institution of 
private property in land, rests upon the preposterous 
assumption that one generation may bind another genera- 
tion. If a man were to come to me and say, " Here is a 
promissory note which your great-grandfather gave to my 
great-grandfather, and which you wiU obhge me by pay- 
ing," I would laugh at him, and tell him that if he wanted 
to collect his note he had better hunt up the man who 
made it ; that I had nothing to do with my great-grand- 
father's promises. And if he were to insist upon payment, 
and to call my attention to the terms of the bond in which 
my great-grandfather expressly stipulated with his great- 
grandfather that I should pay him, I would only laugh the 
more, and be the more certain that he was a lunatic. To 
such a demand any one of us would reply in effect, '' My 
great-grandfather was evidently a knave or a joker, and 
your great-grandfather was certainly a fool, which quality 
you surely have inherited if you expect me to pay you 
money because my great-grandfather promised that I 
should do so. He might as well have given your great- 
grandfather a draft upon Adam or a check upon the First 
National Bank of the Moon." 

Yet upon this assumption that ascendants may bind 
descendants, that one generation may legislate for another 
generation, rests the assumed validity of our land titles 
and public debts. 

If it were possible for the present to borrow of the 
future, for those now living to draw upon wealth to be 
created by those who are yet to come, there could be no 



PUBLIC DEBTS AND INDIRECT TAXATION. 163 

more dangerous power, none more certain to be abused ; 
and none tliat would involve in its exercise a more flagrant 
contempt for the natural and unalienable rights of man. 
But we have no such power, and there is no possible 
invention by which we can obtain it. When we talk 
about calling upon future generations to bear their part 
in the costs and burdens of the present, about imposing 
upon them a share in expenditures we take the liberty of 
assuming they will consider to have been made for their 
benefit as well as for ours, we are carrying metaphor into 
absurdity. Public debts are not a device for borrowing 
from the future, for compelling those yet to be to bear a 
share in expenses which a present generation may choose 
to incur. That is, of course, a physical impossibility. 
They are merely a device for obtaining control of wealth in 
the present by promising that a certain distribution of 
wealth in the future shall be made — a device by which the 
owners of existing wealth are induced to give it up under 
promise, not merely that other people shall be taxed to 
pay them, but that other people's children shall be taxed 
for the benefit of their children or the children of their 
assigns. Those who get control of governments are thus 
enabled to get sums which they could not get by immedi- 
ate taxation without arousing the indignation and resis- 
tance of those who could make the most effective resistance. 
Thus tyrants are enabled to maintain themselves, and 
extravagance and corruption are fostered. If any cases 
can be pointed to in which the power to incur public debts 
has been in any way a benefit, they are as nothing com- 
pared with the cases in which the effects have been purely 
injurious. 

The public debts for which most can be said are those 
contracted for the purpose of making public improvements, 
yet what extravagance and corruption the power of con- 
tracting such debts has engendered in the United States is 



164 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

too well known to require' illustration, and has led, in a 
number of the States, to constitutional restrictions. Even 
the quasi-public debts of railroad and other such corpora- 
tions have similarly led to extravagance and corruption 
that have far outweighed any good results accomplished 
through them. While as for the great national debts of 
the world, incurred as they have been for purposes of 
tyranuy and war, it is impossible to see in them anything 
but evil. Of all these great national debts that of the 
United States will best bear examination; but it is no 
exception. 

As I have before said, the wealth expended in carrying 
on the war did not come from abroad or from the future, 
but from the existing wealth in the States under the 
national flag, and if, when we called on men to die for 
their country, we had not shrunk from taking, if neces- 
sary, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars from 
every millionaire, we need not have created any debt. But 
instead of that, what taxation we did impose was so levied 
as to fall on the poor more heavily than on the rich, and 
incidentally to establish monopolies by which the rich 
could profit at the expense of the poor. And then, when 
more wealth still was needed, instead of taking it from 
those who had it, we told the rich that if they would 
voluntarily let the nation use some of their wealth we 
would make it profitable to them by guaranteeing the use 
of the taxing power to pay them back, principal and 
interest. And we did make it profitable with a vengeance. 
Not only did we, by the institution of the national banking 
system, give them back nine-tenths of much of the money 
thus borrowed while continuing to pay interest on the 
whole amount, but even where it was required neither by 
the letter of the bond nor the equity of the circumstances 
we made debt incurred in depreciated greenbacks payable 
on its face in gold. The consequence of this method of 



PUBLIC DEBTS AND INDIRECT TAXATION. 165 

carrying on the war was to make the rich richer instead 
of poorer. The era of monstrous fortunes in the United 
States dates from the war. 

But if this can be said of the debt of the United States, 
what shall be said of other national debts ! 

In paying interest upon their enormous national debt, 
what is it that the people of England are paying ? They 
are paying interest upon sums thrown or given away by 
profligate tyrants and corrupt oligarchies in generations 
past— upon grants made to courtezans, and panders, and 
sycophants, and traitors to the liberties of their country ; 
upon sums borrowed to corrupt their own legislatures and 
wage wars against both their own liberties and the liberties 
of other peoples. For the Hessians hired and the Indians 
armed and the fleets and armies sent to crush the American 
colonies into submission, with the effect of splitting into 
two what might but for that have perhaps yet been one 
great confederated nation ; for the cost of treading down 
the Irish people and inflicting wounds that yet rankle ; for 
the enormous sums spent in the endeavor to maintain on 
the continent of Europe the blasphemy of divine right; 
for expenditures made to carry rapine among unoffending 
peoples in the four quarters of the globe, Englishmen of 
to-day are taxed. It is not the case of asking a man to 
pay a debt contracted by his great-grandfather ; it is asking 
him to pay for the rope with which his great-gi-andfather 
was hanged, or the fagots with which he was burned. 

The so-caUed Egyptian debt which the power of England 
has recently been used to enforce is a still more flagrant 
instance of spoliation. The late Khedive was no more 
than an Arab robber, living at free quarters in the country 
and plundering its people. All he could get by stripping 
them to starvation and nakedness not satisfying his insen- 
sate and barbarian profligacy, European money-lenders, 
relying upon the assumed sanctity of national debts, 



166 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

offered him money on the most usurious terms. The 
money was spent with the wildest recklessness, upon 
harems, palaces, yachts, diamonds, presents and entertain- 
ments ; yet to extort interest upon it from poverty-stricken 
fellahs, Christian England sends fleets and armies to 
murder and burn, and with her power maintains the 
tyranny and luxury of a khedival puppet at the expense 
of the Egyptian people. 

Thus the device of public debts enables tyrants to 
intrench themselves, and adventurers who seize upon 
government to defy the people. It permits the making of 
great and wasteful expenditures, by silencing, and even 
converting into support, the opposition of those who would 
otherwise resist these expenditures with most energy and 
force. But for the ability of rulers to contract public 
debts, nine-tenths of the wars of Christendom for the past 
two centuries could never have been waged. The destruc- 
tion of wealth and the shedding of blood, the agony of 
wives and mothers and children thus caused, cannot be 
computed, but to these items must be added the waste and 
loss and demoralization caused by constant preparation 
for war. 

Nor do the public misfortunes and corruptions of govern- 
ment which arise from the ignorance and contempt of 
human rights involved in the recognition of public debts, 
end with the costs of war and warlike preparation, and 
the corruptions which such vast public expenditures foster. 
The passions aroused by war, the national hatreds, the 
worship of military glory, the thirst for victory or revenge, 
dull public conscience ; pervert the best social instincts into 
that low, unreasoning extension of selfishness miscalled 
patriotism ; deaden the love of liberty ; lead men to submit 
to tyranny and usurpation from the savage thirst for 
cutting the throats of other people, or the fear of having 
their own throats cut. They so pervert religious percep- 
tions that professed followers of Christ bless in his name 



PUBLIC DEBTS AND INDIEECT TAXATION. 167 

the standards of murder and rapine, and thanks are given 
to the Prince of Peace for victories that pile the earth 
with mangled corpses and make hearthstones desolate ! 

Nor yet does the evil end here. WiUiam H. Vanderbilt, 
with his forty millions of registered bonds, declares that 
the national debt ought not to be paid off; that, on the 
contrary, it ought to be increased, because it gives stability 
to the government, " every man who gets a bond becoming 
a loyal and loving citizen."* Mr. Vanderbilt expresses 
the universal feeling of his kind. It was not loyal and 
loving citizens with bonds in their pockets who rushed to 
the front in our civil war, or who rush to the front in any 
war; but the possession of a bond does tend to make a 
man loyal and loving to whoever may grasp the machinery 
of government, and will continue to cash coupons, A 
great public debt creates a great moneyed interest that 
wants " strong government " and fears change, and thus 
forms a powerful element on which corrupt and tyrannous 
government can always rely as against the people. We 
may see already in the United States the demoralization of 
this influence ; while in Europe, where it has had more 
striking manifestations, it is the mainstay of tyranny, and 
the strongest obstacle to political reform. 

Thomas Jefferson was right when, as a deduction from 
'' the self-evident truth that the land belongs in usufruct 
to the living," he declared that one generation should not 
hold itself bound by the laws or the debts of its prede- 
cessors, and as this widest-minded of American patriots 
and greatest of American statesmen said, measures which 
would give practical effect to this principle will appear 
the more salutary the more they are considered. 

Indirect taxation, the other device by which the people 
are bled without feeling it, and those who could make the 
most effective resistance to extravagance and corruption 

* Interview in New York limes. 



168 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

are bribed into acquiescence, is an invention whereby taxes 
are so levied that those who directly pay are enabled to 
collect them again from others, and generally to collect 
them with a profit, in higher prices. Those who directly 
pay the taxes and, still more important, those who desire 
high prices, are thus interested in the imposition and 
maintenance of taxation, while those on whom the burden 
ultimately falls do not realize it. 

The corrupting effects of indirect taxation are obvious 
wherever it has been resorted to, but nowhere more obvious 
than in the United States. Ever since the war the great 
effort of our National Government has not been to reduce 
taxation, but to find excuses for maintaining war taxation. 
The most corrupting extravagance in every department of 
administration has thus been fostered, and every endeavor 
used to increase expense. We have deliberately substituted 
a costly currency for a cheap currency ; we have deliber- 
ately added to the cost of paying off the public debt ; we 
maintain a costly navy for which we have no sort of use, 
and which, in case of war, would be of no sort of use to 
us ; and an army twelve times as large and fifteen times 
as expensive as we need. We are digging silver out of 
certain holes in the ground in Nevada and Colorado and 
poking it down other holes in the ground in Washington, 
New York and San Francisco. We are spending great 
sums in useless "public improvements," and are paying 
pensions under a law which seems framed but to put a 
premium upon fraud and get away with public money. 
And yet the great question before Congress is what to do 
with the surplus. Any proposition to reduce taxation 
arouses the most bitter opposition from those who profit 
or who imagine they profit from the imposition of this 
taxation, and a clamorous lobby surrounds Congress, 
begging, buUying, bribing, log-rolling against the reduction 
of taxation, each interest protesting and insisting that 



PUBLIC DEBTS AND INDIRECT TAXATION. 169 

whatever tax is reduced, its own pet tax must be left intact. 
This clamor of special interests for the continuance of 
indirect taxation may give us some idea of how much 
greater are the sums these taxes take from the people than 
those they put in the treasury. But it is only a faint idea, 
for besides what goes to the government and what is inter- 
cepted by private interests, there are the loss and waste 
caused by the artificial restrictions and difficulties which 
this system of indirect taxation places in the way of pro- 
duction and exchange, and which unquestionably amount 
to far more than the other two items. 

The cost of this system that can be measured in money 
is, however, of little moment as compared with its effect 
in corrupting government, in debasing public morals and 
befogging the thought of the people. The first thing every 
man is caUed upon to do when he reaches this "land of 
liberty" is to take a false oath ; the next thing he is called 
upon to do is to bribe a Custom-House officer. And so 
on, through every artery of the body politic and every 
fiber of the public mind, runs the poisonous virus. Law 
is brought into contempt by the making of actions that 
are not crimes in morals crimes in law ; the unscrupulous 
are given an advantage over the scrupulous ; voters are 
bought, officials are corrupted, the press is debauched; 
and the persistent advocacy of these selfish interests has 
so far beclouded popular thought that a very large number 
—I am inclined to think a very large majority— of the 
American people actually believe that they are benefited 
by being thus taxed ! 

To recount in detail the public misfortunes and cor- 
ruptions of government which arise from this vicious 
system of taxation would take more space than I can here 
devote to the subject. But what I wish specially to point 
out is, that, like the evils arising from public debts, they 
are in the last analysis due to " ignorance, neglect or con- 



170 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

tempt of human rights." While every citizen may properly 
be called upon to bear his fair share in all proper expenses 
of government, it is manifestly an infringement of natural 
rights to use the taxing power so as to give one citizen 
an advantage over another, to take from some the proceeds 
of their labor in order to swell the profit of others, and to 
punish as crimes actions which in themselves are not 
injurious. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 

TO prevent government from becoming corrupt and 
tyrannous, its organization and methods should be 
as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those 
necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it 
should be kept as close to the people and as directly within 
their control as may be. 

"We have ignored these principles in many ways, and 
the result has been corruption and demoralization, the 
loss of control by the people, and the wresting of govern- 
ment to the advantage of the few and the spoliation of the 
many. The line of reform, on one side at least, lies in 
simplification. 

The first and main purpose of government is admirably 
stated in that grand document which we Americans so 
honor and so ignore— the Declaration of Independence. 
It is to secure to men those equal and unalienable rights 
with which the Creator has endowed them. I shaU here- 
after show how the adoption of the only means by which, 
in civilized and progressive society, the first of these 
unalienable rights— the equal right to land— can be 
secured, will at the same time greatly simplify govern- 
ment and do away with corrupting influences. And 
beyond this, much simplification is possible, and should 
be sought wherever it can be attained. As political cor- 
ruption makes it easier to resist the demand for reform, 



172 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

whatever may be done to purify politics and bring govern- 
ment within the intelligent supervision and control of the 
people is in itself not merely an end to be sought, but a 
means to larger ends. 

The American Republic has no more need for its bur- 
lesque of a navy than a peaceable giant would have for a 
stuffed club or a tin sword. It is maintained only for the 
sake of the officers and the naval rings. In peace it is 
a som-ce of expense and corruption; in war it would be 
useless. We are too strong for any foreign power wan- 
tonly to attack, we ought to be too great wantonly to 
attack others. If war should ever be forced upon us, 
we could safely rely upon science and invention, which 
are already superseding na^des faster than they can be 
built. 

So with our army. All we need, if we even now need 
that, is a small force of frontier poHce, such as is main- 
tained in Australia and Canada. Standing navies a,nd 
standing armies are inimical to the genius of democracy, 
and it ought to be our pride, as it is our duty, to show the 
world that a great republic can dispense with both. And 
in organization, as in principle, both our navy and our 
army are repugnant to the democratic idea. In both we 
maintain that distinction between commissioned officers 
and common soldiers and sailors which arose in Europe 
when the nobility who furnished the one were considered 
a superior race to the serfs and peasants who supplied the 
other. The whole system is an insult to democracy, and 
ought to be swept away. 

Our diplomatic system, too, is servilely copied from the 
usages of kings who plotted with each other against the 
liberties of the people, before the ocean steamship and 
the telegraph were invented. It serves no purpose save to 
reward unscrupulous politicians and corruptionists, and 
occasionally to demoralize a poet. To abolish it would 
save expense, corruption and national dignity. 



THE FUNCTIONS OF aoVERNMENT. 173 

In legal administration there is a large field for radical 
reform. Here, too, we have servilely copied English pre- 
cedents, and have allowed lawyers to make law in the 
interests of their class until justice is a costly gamble for 
which a poor man cannot afford to sue. The best use that 
could be made of our great law libraries, to which the 
reports of thirty-eight States, of the Federal courts, and 
of the English, Scotch and Irish coui'ts are each year being 
added, would be to send them to the paper-mills, and to 
adopt such principles and methods of procedure as would 
reduce our great army of lawyers at least to the French 
standard. At the same time our statute-books are full of 
enactments which could, with advantage, be swept away. 
It is not the business of government to make men virtuous 
or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences 
of his own folly. Grovernment should be repressive no 
further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting 
the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of 
others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend 
beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very 
ends they are intended to serve. For while the tendency 
of laws which prohibit or command what the moral sense 
does not, is to bring law into contempt and produce 
hypocrisy and evasion, so the attempt to bring law to 
the aid of morals as to those acts and relations which 
do not plainly involve violation of the liberty of others, is 
to weaken rather than to strengthen moral influences ; to 
make the standard of wrong and right a legal one, and to 
enable him who can dexterously escape the punishment of 
the law to escape all punishment. Thus, for instance, 
there can be no doubt that the standard of commercial 
honesty would be much higher in the absence of laws for 
the collection of debts. As to all such matters, the cun- 
ning rogue keeps within the law or evades the law, while 
the existence of a legal standard lowers the moral standard 
and weakens the sanction of public opinion. 



174 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

Restrictions, prohibitions, interferences with the liberty 
of action in itself harmless, are evil in their nature, and, 
though they may sometimes be necessary, may for the 
most part be likened to medicines which suppress or 
modify some symptom without lessening the disease ; and, 
generally, where restrictive or prohibitive laws are called 
for, the evils they are designed to meet may be traced 
to previous restriction — to some curtailment of natural 
rights. 

All the tendencies of the time are to the absorption of 
smaller communities, to the enlargement of the area within 
which uniformity of law and administration is necessary 
or desirable. But for this very reason we ought with the 
more tenacity to hold, wherever possible, to the principle 
of local self-government— the principle that, in things 
which concern only themselves, the people of each political 
sub-division— township, ward, city or State, as may be— 
shall act for themselves. We have neglected this principle 
within our States even more than in the relations between 
the State and National Governments, and in attempting 
to govern great cities by State commissions, and in making 
what properly belongs to County Supervisors and Town- 
ship Trustees the business of legislatures, we have divided 
responsibility and promoted corruption. 

Much, too, may be done to restrict the abuse of party 
machinery, and make the ballot the true expression of the 
will of the voter, by simplifying our elective methods. 
And a principle should always be kept in mind which 
we have largely ignored, that the people cannot manage 
details, nor intelligently choose more than a few officials. 
To call upon the average citizen to vote at each election 
for a long string of candidates, as to the majority of whom 
he can know nothing unless he makes a business of 
politics, is to relegate choice to nominating conventions 
and political rings. And to divide power is often to 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 175 

destroy responsibility, and to provoke, not to prevent, 
usurpation. 

I can but briefly allude to these matters, though in 
themselves they deserve much attention. It is the more 
necessary to simphfy government as much as possible and 
to improve, as much as may be, what may be called the 
mechanics of government, because, with the progress of 
society, the functions which government must assume 
steadily increase. It is only in the infancy of society that 
the functions of government can be properly confined to 
providing for the common defense and protecting the 
weak against the physical power of the strong. As society 
develops in obedience to that law of integration and 
increasing complexity of which I spoke in the first of 
these chapters, it becomes necessary in order to secure 
equality that other regulations should be made and 
enforced ; and upon the primary and restrictive functions 
of government are superimposed what may be called 
cooperative functions, the refusal to assume which leads, 
in many cases, to the disregard of individual rights as 
surely as does the assumption of directive and restrictive 
functions not properly belonging to government. 

In the division of labor and the specialization of vocation 
that begin in an early stage of social development, and 
increase with it, the assumption by individuals of certain 
parts in the business of society necessarily operates to the 
exclusion of other individuals. Thus when one opens a 
store or an inn, or establishes a regular carriage of pas- 
sengers or goods, or devotes himself to a special trade or 
profession of which all may have need, his doing of these 
things operates to prevent others from doing them, and 
leads to the establishment of habits and customs which 
make resort to him a necessity to others, and which would 
put those who were denied this resort at a great disadvan- 
tage as compared with other individuals. Thus to secure 



176 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

quality it becomes necessary so to limit liberty of action 
as to oblige those who thus take upon themselves quasi- 
public functions to serve without discrimination those 
who may apply to them upon customary conditions. This 
principle is recognized by all nations that have made any 
progress in civilization, in their laws relating to common 
carriers, innkeepers, etc. 

As civilization progresses and industrial development 
goes on, the concentration which results from the utiliza- 
tion of larger powers and improved processes operates 
more and more to the restriction and exclusion of com- 
petition, and to the establishment of complete monopolies. 
This we may see very clearly in the railroad. It is but 
a sheer waste of capital and labor to build one railroad 
alongside of another j and even where this is done, an 
irresistible tendency leads either to consolidation or to 
combination ; and even at what are called competing 
points, competition is only transitional. The consolida- 
tion of companies, which in a few years bids fair to concen- 
trate the whole railway business of the United States in 
the hands of half a dozen managements, the pooling of 
receipts, and agreements as to business and charges, which 
even at competing points prevent competition, are due to 
a tendency inherent in the development of the railroad 
system, and of which it is idle to complain. 

The primary purpose and end of government being to 
secure the natural rights and equal liberty of each, all 
businesses that involve monopoly are within the neces- 
sary province of governmental regulation, and businesses 
that are in their nature complete monopolies become 
properly functions of the state. As society develops, the 
state must assume these functions, in their nature cooper- 
ative, in order to secure the equal rights and liberty of 
all. That is to say, as, in the process of integration, the 
individual becomes more and more dependent upon and 
subordinate to vthe all, it becomes necessary for govern- 



THE FUNCTIONS OF aOVERNMENT. 177 

ment, whicli is properly that social organ by whicli alone 
tlie whole body of individuals can act, to take upon itself, 
in the interest of all, certain functions which cannot 
safely be left to individuals. Thus out of the principle 
that it is the proper end and purpose of government to 
secure the natural rights and equal liberty of the individual, 
grows the principle that it is the business of government 
to do for the mass of individuals those things which cannot 
be done, or cannot be so well done, by individual action. 
As in the development of species, the power of conscious, 
coordinated action of the whole being must assume greater 
and greater relative importance to the automatic action of 
parts, so is it in the development of society. This is the 
truth in socialism, which, although it is being forced upon 
us by industrial progress and social development, we are 
so slow to recognize. 

In the physical organism, weakness and disease result 
alike from the overstraining of functions and from the 
non-use of functions. In like manner governments may 
be corrupted and public misfortunes induced by the failure 
to assume, as governmental, functions that properly belong 
to government as the controlling organ in the management 
of common interests, as well as from interferences by 
government in the proper sphere of individual action. 
This we may see in our own case. In what we attempt 
to do by government and what we leave undone we are 
like a man who should leave the provision of his dinner 
to the promptings of his stomach while attempting to 
govern his digestion by the action of his will ; or like one 
who, in walking through a crowded street or over a bad 
road, should concentrate aU his conscious faculties upon 
the movement of his legs without paying any attention to 
where he was going. 

To illustrate : It is not the business of government to 
interfere with the views which any one may hold of the 
Creator or with the worship he may choose to pay him, so 



178 SOCIAL PKOBLEMS. 

long as the exercise of these individual rights does not 
conflict with the equal liberty of others ; and the result 
of governmental interference in this domain has been 
hypocrisy, corruption, persecution and religious war. It 
is not the business of government to direct the employ- 
ment of labor and capital, and to foster certain industries 
at the expense of other industries ; and the attempt to do 
so leads to all the waste, loss and corruption due to pro- 
tective tariffs. 

On the other hand, it is the business of government to 
issue money. This is perceived as soon as the great labor- 
saving invention of money supplants barter. To leave it 
to every one who chose to do so to issue money would be 
to entail general inconvenience and loss, to offer many 
temptations to roguery, and to put the poorer classes of 
society at a great disadvantage. These obvious considera- 
tions have everywhere, as society became well organized, 
led to the recognition of the coinage of money as an 
exclusive function of government. When, in the progress 
of society, a further labor-saving improvement becomes 
possible by the substitution of paper for the precious metals 
as the material for money, the reasons why the issuance 
of this money should be made a government function 
become still stronger. The e\Tls entailed by wildcat 
banking in the United States are too well remembered to 
need reference. The loss and inconvenience, the swindling 
and corruption that flowed from the assumption by each 
State of the Union of the power to license banks of issue 
ended with the war, and no one would now go back to 
them. Yet instead of doing what every public considera- 
tion impels us to, and assuming wholly and fully as the 
exclusive function of the General Government the power 
to issue paper money, the private interests of bankers 
have, up to this, compelled us to the use of a hybrid cur- 
rency, of which a large part, though guaranteed by the 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 179 

General Government, is issued and made profitable to cor- 
porations. The legitimate business of banking— tlie safe- 
keeping and loaning of money, and the making and exchange 
of credits, is properly left to individuals and associations ; 
but by leaving to them, even in part and under restrictions 
and guaranties, the issuance of money, the people of the 
United States suffer an annual loss of millions of dollars, 
and sensibly increase the influences which exert a cor- 
rupting effect upon their government. 

The principle evident here may be seen in even stronger 
light in another department of social life. 

The great ''railroad question," with its dangers and 
perplexities, is a most striking instance of the evil conse- 
quences which result from the failure of the state to assume 
functions that properly belong to it. 

In rude stages of social development, and where govern- 
ment, neglectful of its proper functions, has been occu- 
pied in making needless wars and imposing harmful 
restrictions, the making and improvement of highways 
have been left to individuals, who, to recompense them- 
selves, have been permitted to exact tolls. It has, however, 
from the first, been recognized that these tolls are properly 
subject to governmental control and regulation. But the 
great inconveniences of this system, and the heavy taxes 
which, in spite of attempted regulation, are under it levied 
upon production, have led, as social advance went on, to 
the assumption of the making and maintenance of high- 
roads as a governmental duty. In the course of social 
development came the invention of the railroad, which 
merged the business of making and maintaining roads 
with the business of carrying freight and passengers upon 
them. It is probably due to this that it was not at first 
recognized that the same reasons which render it necessary 
for the state to make and maintain common roads apply 
with even greater force to the building and operating of 



180 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

railroads. In Great Britain and the United States, and, 
with partial exceptions, in other countries, railroads have 
been left to private enterprise to build and private greed 
to manage. In the United States, where railroads are of 
more importance than in any other country in the world, 
our only recognition of their public character has been in 
the donation of lands and the granting of subsidies, which 
have been the cause of much corruption, and in some 
feeble attempts to regulate fares and freights. 

But the fact that the railroad system as far as yet de- 
veloped (and perhaps necessarily) combines transportation 
with the maintenance of roadways, renders competition 
all the more impossible, and brings it still more clearly 
within the province of the state. That it makes the 
assumption of the railroad business by the state a most 
serious matter is not to be denied. Even if it were possible, 
which may well be doubted, as has ceen sometimes pro- 
posed, to have the roadway maintained by the state, 
leaving the furnishing of trains to private enterprise, it 
would be still a most serious matter. But look at it which 
way we may, it is so serious a matter that it must be faced. 
As the individual grows from childhood to maturity, he 
must meet difficulties and accept responsibihties from 
which he well might shrink. So is it with society. New 
powers bring new duties and new responsibilities. Impru- 
dence in going forward involves danger, but it is fatal to 
stand stiU. And however great be the difficulties involved 
in the assumption of the railroad business by the state, 
much greater difficulties are involved in the refusal to 
assume it. 

It is not necessary to go into any elaborate argument 
to show that the ownership and management of railroads 
are functions of the stace. That is proved beyond dispute 
by the logic of events and of existing facts. Nothing is 
more obvious— at least in the United States, where the 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 181 

tendencies of modern development may be seen much 
more clearly than in Europe— than that a union of rail- 
roading with the other functions of government is inevi- 
table. We may not like it, but we cannot avoid it. Either 
government must manage the railroads, or the railroads 
must manage the government. There is no escape. To 
refuse one horn of the dilemma is to be impaled on the 
other. 

As for any satisfactory state regulation of railroads, 
the experience of our States shows it to be impossible. 
A strong-willed despot, clothed with arbitrary power, 
might curb such leviathans 5 but popular governments 
cannot. The power of the whole people is, of course, 
greater than the power of the railroads, but it cannot be 
exerted steadily and in details. Even a small special 
interest is, by reason of its intelligence, compactness and 
flexibility, more than a match for large and vague general 
interests; it has the advantage which belongs to a well- 
armed and disciplined force in dealing with a mob. But 
in the number of its employees, the amount of its revenues, 
and the extent of the interests which it controls, the rail- 
road power is gigantic. And, growing faster than the 
growth of the country, it is tending still faster to con- 
centration. It may be that the man is already born who 
will control the whole railroad system of the United States, 
as Vanderbilt, Gould and Huntington now control great 
sections of it. 

Practical politicians all over the United States recognize 
the utter hopelessness of contending with the railroad 
power. In many if not in most of the States, no prudent 
man will run for office if he believes the railroad power is 
against him. Yet in the direct appeal to the people a 
power of this kind is weakest, and railroad kings rule 
States where, on any issues that came fairly before the 
people, they would be voted down. It is by throwing their 



182 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

weight into primaries, and managing conventions, by- 
controlling the press, manipulating legislatm-es, and filling 
the bench with theii- creatures, that the railroads best 
exert political power. The people of California, for 
instance, have voted against the railroad time and again, 
or rather imagined they did, and even adopted a very bad 
new constitution because they supposed the raih'oad was 
against it. The result is, that the great railroad company, 
of whose domain California, with an area greater than 
twice that of Great Britain, is but one of the provinces, 
absolutely dominates the State. The men who really 
fought it are taken into its service or crushed, and powers 
are exerted in the interests of the corporation managers 
which no government would dare attempt. This company, 
heavily subsidized, in the fii-st place, as a great pubhc con- 
venience, levies on commerce, not tolls, but tariffs. If a 
man goes into business requiiing transportation he must 
exhibit his profits and take it into partnership for the lion's 
share. Importers are bound by an '' iron-clad agreement " 
to give its agents access to their books, and if they do 
anything the company deems against its interests they 
are fined or ruined by being placed at a disadvantage to 
their rivals in business. Three continental raih'oads, 
heavily subsidized hj the nation under the impression that 
the competition would keep down rates, have now reached 
the Pacific. Instead of competing they have pooled their 
receipts. The line of steamers from San Francisco to New 
York via the Isthmus receives $100,000 a month to keep 
up fares and freights to a level with those exacted by the 
railroad, and if you would send goods from New York to 
San Francisco by way of the Isthmus, the cheapest way is 
fii'st to ship them to England. Shippers to interior points 
are charged as much as though their goods were carried 
to the end of the road and then shipped back again ; and 
even, by means of the agreements mentioned, an embargo 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 183 

is laid upon ocean commerce by sailing-vessels, wherever 
it might interfere with the monopoly. 

I speak of California only as an instance. The power 
of the railroads is apparent in State after State, as it is 
in the National Government. Nothing can be clearer than 
that, if present conditions must continue, the American 
people might as well content themselves to surrender 
political power to these great corporations and their affili- 
ated interests. There is no escape from this. The rail- 
road managers cannot keep out of politics, even if they 
wished to. The difficulties of the railroad question do 
not arise from the fact that peculiarly bad men have got 
control of the railroads; they arise from the nature of 
the railroad business and its intimate relations to other 
interests and industries. 

But it will be said : " If the railroads are even now a 
corrapting element in our politics, what would they be if 
the government were to own and to attempt to run them ? 
Is not governmental management notoriously corrupt and 
inefficient? Would not the effect of adding such a vast 
army to the already great number of govei'nment em- 
ployees, of increasing so enormously the revenues and 
expenditures of government, be to enable those who got 
control of government to defy opposition and perpetuate 
their power indefinitely ; and would it not be, finally, to 
sink the whole political organization in a hopeless slough 
of corruption ? " 

My reply is, that great as these dangers may be, they 
must be faced, lest worse befall us. When a gale sets him 
on a lee shore, the seaman must make sail, even at the risk 
of having his canvas fly from the bolt-ropes and his masts 
go by the board. The dangers of wind and sea urge him 
to make everything snug as may be, alow and aloft ; to 
get rid of anything that might diminish the weatherly 
qualities of his ship, and to send his best helmsman to the 



184 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

wheel,— not supinely to accept the certain destruction of 
the rocks. 

Instead of belittling the dangers of adding to the func- 
tions of government as it is at present, what I am endeav- 
oring to point out is the urgent necessity of simplifying 
and improving government, that it may safely assume the 
additional functions that social development forces upon 
it. It is not merely necessary to prevent government from 
getting more corrupt and more inefficient, though we can 
no more do that by a negative policy than the seaman can 
lay to in a gale without drifting ; it is necessary to make 
government much more efficient and much less corrupt. 
The dangers that menace us are not accidental. They 
spring from a universal law which we cannot escape. That 
law is the one I pointed out in the first chapter of this book 
— that every advance brings new dangers and requires 
higher and more alert intelligence. As the more highly 
organized animal cannot live unless it have a more fuUy 
developed brain than those of lower animal organizations, 
so the more highly organized society must perish unless it 
bring to the management of social affairs greater intel- 
ligence and higher moral sense. The great material 
advances which modern invention has enabled us to make, 
necessitate corresponding social and political advances. 
Nature knows no " Baby Act." "We must live up to her 
conditions or not live at all. 

My purpose here is to show how important it is that we 
simplify government, purify politics and improve social 
conditions, as a preliminary to showing how much in all 
these directions may be accomplished by one single great 
reform. But although I shall be obliged to do so briefly, 
it may be worth while, even if briefly, to call attention to 
some principles that should not be forgotten in thinking 
of the assumption by the state of such functions as the 
running of railroads. 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVEENMENT. 185 

In the first place, I think it may be accepted as a prin- 
ciple proved by experience, that any considerable interest 
having necessary relations with government is more cor- 
ruptive of government when acting upon government from 
without than when assumed by government. Let a ship 
in mid-ocean drop her anchor and pay out her cable, and 
though she would be relieved of some weight, since part 
of the weight of anchor and cable would be supported by 
the water, not only would her progress be retarded, but 
she would refuse to answer her helm, and become utterly 
unmanageable. Yet, assumed as part of the ship, and 
properly stowed on board, anchor and cable no longer 
perceptibly interfere with her movements. 

A standing army is a corrupting influence, and a danger 
to popular liberties ; but who would maintain that on this 
ground it were wiser, if a standing army must be kept, 
that it should be enlisted and paid by private parties, and 
hired of them by the state ? Such an army would be far 
more corrupting and far more dangerous than one main- 
tained directly by the state, and would soon make its 
leaders masters of the state. 

I do not think the postal department of the government, 
with its extensive ramifications and its numerous employ- 
tjes, begins to be as important a factor in our politics, or 
exerts so corrupting an influence, as would a private cor- 
poration carrying on this business, and which would be 
constantly tempted or forced into politics to procure 
favorable or prevent unfavorable legislation. Where 
individual States and the General Government have sub- 
stituted public printing-offices for Public Printers, who 
themselves furnished material and hired labor, I think the 
result has been to lessen, not to increase, corruptive influ- 
ences ; and speaking generally, I think experience shows 
that in all departments of government the system of con- 
tracting for work and supplies has, on the whole, led to 



186 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

more corruption than the system of direct employment. 
The reason I take to be, that there is in one case a much 
greater concentration of corruptive interests and power 
than in the other. 

The inefficiency, extravagance and corruption vs^hich we 
commonly attribute to governmental management are 
mostly in those departments which do not come under 
the public eye, and little concern, if they concern at all, 
public convenience. Whether the six new steel cruisers 
which the persistent lobbying of contractors has induced 
Congress to order, are well or ill built the American people 
will never know, except as they learn through the news- 
papers, and the fact will no more affect their comfort and 
convenience than does the fitting of the Sultan's new 
breeches, or the latest changes in officers' uniforms which 
it has pleased the Secretary of the Navy to order. But 
let the mails go astray or the postman fail in his rounds, 
and there is at once an outcry. The post-office department 
is managed with greater efficiency than any other depart- 
ment of the National Government, because it comes close 
to the people. To say the very least, it is managed as 
efficiently as any private company could manage such a vast 
business, and I think, on the whole, as economically. And 
the scandals and abuses that have arisen in it have been, 
for the most part, as to out-of-the-way places, and things 
of which there was little or no public consciousness. So in 
England, the telegraph and parcel-carrying and savings- 
bank businesses are managed by government more efficiently 
and economically than before by private corporations. 

Like these businesses— perhaps even more so— tlie rail- 
road business comes directly under the notice of the people. 
It so immediately concerns the interests, the convenience 
and the safety of the great body, that under public manage- 
ment it would compel that close and quick attention that 
secures efficiency. 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVEENMENT. 187 

It seems to me that in regard to public affairs we too 
easily accept the dictum that faithful and efficient work 
can be secured only by the hopes of pecuniary profit, or 
the fear of pecuniary loss. We get faithful and efficient 
work in our colleges and similar institutions without this, 
not to speak of the army and navy, or of the postal and 
educational departments of government; and be this as 
it may, our railroads are really run by men who, from 
switch-tender to general superintendent, have no pecu- 
niary interest in the business other than to get their pay 
— in most cases paltry and insufficient — and hold their 
positions. Under governmental ownership they would 
have, at the very least, all the incentives to faithfulness 
and efficiency that they have now, for that governmental 
management of railroads must involve the principles of 
civil service reform goes without the saying. The most 
determined supporter of the spoils system would not care 
to resign the safety of limb and life to engineers and 
brakemen appointed for political services. 

Look, moreover, at-the railroad system as it exists now. 
That it is not managed in the interests of the public is 
clear ; but is it mana^ged in the interests of its owners I 
Is it managed with that economy, efficiency and intelli- 
gence that are presumed to be the results of private 
ownership and control? On the contrary, while the 
public interests are utterly disregarded, the interests of 
the stockholders are in most cases little better considered. 
Our railroads are really managed in the interests of 
unscrupulous adventurers, whose purpose is to bull and 
bear the stock-market ; by men who make the interests of 
the property they manage subservient to their personal 
interests in other railroads or in other businesses ; who 
speculate in lands and town sites, who give themselves or 
their friends contracts for supplies and special rates for 
transportation, and who often deliberately wreck the cor- 



188 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

poration they control and rob stockholders to the last 
cent. From one end to the other, the management of our 
railroad system, as it now exists, reeks with jobbery and 
fraud. 

That ordinary roads, bridges, etc., should not be main- 
tained for profit, either public or private, is an accepted 
principle, and the State of New York has recently gone so 
far as to abolish all tolls on the Erie Canal. Our postal 
service we merely aim to make self-sustaining, and no one 
would now think of proposing that the rates of postage 
should be increased in order to furnish public revenues ; 
still less would any one think of proposing to abandon 
the government postal service, and turn the business over 
to individuals or corporations. In the beginning the postal 
service was carried on by indi\'iduals with a view to profits, 
Had that system been continued to the present day, it is 
certain that we should not begin to have such extensive 
and regular postal facilities as we have now, nor such 
cheap rates ; and all the objections that are now urged 
against the government assumption of the railroad business 
would be urged against government carriage of letters. 
We never can enjoy the full benefits of the invention of 
the railroad until we make the railroads public property, 
managed by public servants in the public interests. And 
thus will a great cause of the corruption of government, 
and a great cause of monstrous fortunes, be destroyed. 

AU I have said of the railroad applies, of course, to the 
telegraph, the telephone, the supplying of cities with gas, 
water, heat and electricity,— in short to all businesses 
which are in their nature monopolies. I speak of the 
railroad only because the magnitude of the business makes 
its assumption by the state the most formidable of such 
undertakings. 

Businesses that are in their nature monopolies are prop- 
erly functions of the state. The state must control or 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 189 

assume them, in self-defense, and for the protection of the 
equal rights of citizens. But beyond this, the field in 
■which the state may operate beneficially as the executive 
of the great cooperative association, into which it is the 
tendency of true civilization to blend society, will widen 
with the improvement of government and the growth of 
public spirit. 

We have already made an important step in this direc- 
tion in our public-school system. Our public schools are 
not maintained for the poor, as are the English board 
schools— where, moreover, payment is required from all 
who can pay ; nor yet is their main motive the protection 
of the state against ignorance. These are subsidiary 
motives. But the main motive for the maintenance of 
our public schools is, that by far the greater part of our 
people find them the best and most economical means of 
educating their children. American society is, in fact, 
organized by the operation of government into cooperative 
educational associations, and with such happy results that 
in no State where the public-school system has obtained 
would any proposition to abolish it get respectful con- 
sideration. In spite of the corruption of our politics, our 
public schools are, on the whole, much better than private 
schools ; while by their association of the children of rich 
and poor, of Jew and Gentile, of Protestant and Catholic, 
of Republican and Democrat, they are of inestimable value 
in breaking down prejudice and checking the growth of 
class feeling. It is likewise to be remarked as to our 
pubhc-school system, that corruptive influences seem to 
spring rather from our not having gone far enough than 
from our having gone too far in the direction of state 
action. In some of our States the books used by the 
children are supplied at public expense, being considered 
school property, which the pupil receives on entering the 
school or class, and returns when leaving. In most of 



190 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

them, however, the papils, unless their parents cannot 
afford the outlay, are required to furnish their own books. 
Experience has shown the former system to be much the 
better, not only because, when books are furnished to all, 
there is no temptation of those who can afford to purchase 
books falsely to plead indigence, and no humiliation on 
the part of those who cannot ; but because the number of 
books required is much less, and they can be purchased 
at cheaper rates. This not only effects a large economy 
in the aggregate expenditure, but lessens an important 
corruptive influence. For the strife of the great school- 
book publishers to get their books adopted in the public 
schools, in which, most of them make no scruple of resorting 
to bribery wherever they can, has done much to degrade 
the character of school boards. This corruptive influence 
can only be fully done away with by manufacturing school- 
books at public expense, as has been in a number of the 
States proposed. 

The public-library system, which, beginning in the 
public-spirited city of Boston, is steadily making its way 
over the country, and under which both reading and lend- 
ing libraries are maintained at public expense for the free 
use of the public, is another instance of the successful 
extension of the cooperative functions of government. So 
are the public parks and recreation grounds which we are 
beginning to establish. 

Not only is it possible to go much further in the direc- 
tion of thus providing, at public expense, for the public 
health, education and recreation, and for public encom'age- 
ment of science and invention, but if we can simplify and 
purify government it will become possible for society in 
its various sub-divisions to obtain in many other ways, 
but in much larger degree, those advantages for its 
members that voluntary cooperative societies seek to 
obtain. Not only could the most enormous economies 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 191 

thus be obtained, but the growing tendency to adulteration 
and dishonesty, as fatal to morals as to health, would be 
checked,* and at least such an organization of industry 
be reached as would very greatly reduce the appropriative 
power of aggregated capital, and prevent those strifes 
that may be likened to wars. The natural progress of 
social development is unmistakably toward cooperation, 
or, if the word be preferred, toward socialism, though I 
dislike to use a word to which snch various and vague 
meanings are attached. Civilization is the art of living 
together in closer relations. That mankind should dwell 
together in unity is the evident intent of the Divine mind, 
— of that Will expressed in the immutable laws of the 
physical and moral universe which reward obedience and 
punish disobedience. The dangers which menace modern 
society are but the reverse of blessings which modern 
society may grasp. The concentration that is going on in 
all branches of industry is a necessary tendency of our 
advance in the material arts. It is not in itself an evil. 
If in anything its results are evil, it is simply because of 
our bad social adjustments. The construction of this 
world in which we find ourselves is such that a thousand 
men working together can produce many times more than 
the same thousand men working singly. But this does 

* There are m any mamifaetured articles for whicli the producer now 
receives only a third of the price paid by the consumer, while adultera- 
tion has gone far beyond detection by the individual purchaser. Not 
to speak of the compounding of liquors, of oleomargarine and glucose, 
a single instance will show how far adulteration is carried. The 
adulterations in ground coffee have driven many people to purchase 
their coffee in the bean and grind it themselves. To meet this, at 
least one firm of large coffee-roasters, and I presume most of them, 
have adopted an invention by means of which imitation coffee-beans, 
exactly resembling in appearance the genuine article, are stamped 
out of a paste. These they mix in large quantities with real 
coffee. 



192 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

not make it neeessarytliat the nine hundred and ninety- 
nine must be the virtual slaves of the one. 

Let me repeat it, though again and again, for it is, it 
seems to me, the great lesson which existing social facts 
impress upon him who studies them, and that it is all 
important that we should heed : The natural laws which 
permit of social advance, require that advance to be 
intellectual and moral as well as material. The natural 
laws which give us the steamship, the locomotive, the 
telegraph, the printing-press, and all the thousand inven- 
tions by which our mastery over matter and material 
conditions is increased, require greater social intelligence 
and a higher standard of social morals. Especially do 
they make more and more imperative that justice between 
man and man which demands the recognition of the 
equality of natural rights. 

*' Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness 
[right or just doing] and all these things shall be added 
unto you." The first step toward a natural and healthy 
organization of society is to secure to all men their natu- 
ral, equal and unalienable rights in the material universe. 
To do this is not to do everything that may be necessary j 
but it is to make all else easier. And unless we do this 
nothing else will avail. 

I have in this chapter touched briefly upon subjects 
that for thorough treatment would require much more 
space. My purpose has been to show that the simplifica- 
tion and purification of government are rendered the more 
necessary, on account of functions which industrial devel- 
opment is forcing upon government, and the further func- 
tions which it is becoming more and more evident that it 
would be advantageous for government to assume. In 
succeeding chapters I propose to show how, by recognizing 
in practicable method the equal and unalienable rights 
of men to the soil of their country, government may be 



THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. 193 

greatly simplified, and corrupting influences destroyed. 
For it is indeed true, as the French. Assembly declared, 
that public misfortunes and corruptions of government 
spring from ignorance, neglect or contempt of human 
'jights. 

Of course in this chapter and elsewhere in speaking of 
government, the state, the community, etc., I use these 
terms in a general sense, without reference to existing 
political divisions. What should properly belong to the 
township or ward, what to the county or State, what to 
the nation, and what to such federations of nations as it 
is in the manifest line of civilization to evolve, is a matter 
into which I have not entered. As to the proper organiza- 
tion of government, and the distribution of powers, there 
is much D eed for thought. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

WHAT WE MUST DO. 

AT the risk of repetition let me recapitulate : 
JLlL The main source of the difficulties that menace us 
is the growing inequality in the distribution of wealth. 
To this all modern inventions seem to contribute, and the 
movement is hastened by political corruption, and by 
special monopolies established by abuse of legislative 
power. But the primary cause lies evidently in funda- 
mental social adjustments— in the relations which we have 
established between labor and the natural material and 
means of labor — between man and the planet which is his 
dwelhng-place, workshop and storehouse. As the earth 
must be the foundation of every material structure, so 
institutions which regulate the use of land constitute the 
foundation of every social organization, and must affect 
the whole character and development of that organization. 
In a society where the equality of natural rights is recog- 
nized, it is manifest that there can be no great disparity 
in fortunes. None except the physically incapacitated will 
be dependent on others ; none will be forced to sell their 
labor to others. There will be differences in wealth, for 
there are differences among men as to energy, skill, pru- 
dence, foresight and industry; but there can be no very 
rich class, and no very poor class ; and, as each generation 
becomes possessed of equal natural opportunities, whatever 
differences in fortune grow up in one generation will not 



WHAT WE MUST DO. 195 

tend to perpetuate themselves. In such a community, 
whatever may be its form, the political organization must 
be essentially democratic. 

But, in a community where the soil is treated as the 
property of but a portion of the people, some of these 
people from the very day of their birth must be at a dis- 
advantage, and some will have an enormous advantage. 
Those who have no rights in the land wiU be forced to 
sell their labor to the landholders for what they can get ; 
and, in fact, cannot live without the landlords' permission. 
Such a community must inevitably develop a class of 
masters and a class of serfs— a class possessing great 
wealth, and a class having nothing; and its political 
organization, no matter what its form, must become a 
virtual despotism. 

Our fundamental mistake is in treating land as private 
property. On this false basis modern civilization every- 
where rests, and hence, as material progress goes on, is 
everywhere developing such monstrous inequalities in 
condition as must ultimately destroy it. As without land 
man cannot exist ; as his very physical substance, and all 
that he 0B,n acquire or make, must be drawn from the 
land, the ownership of the land of a country is necessarily 
the ownership of the people of that country— involving 
their industrial, social and political subjection. Here is 
the great reason why the labor-saving inventions, of which 
our century has been so strikingly prolific, have signally 
failed to improve the condition of laborers. Labor-saving 
inventions primarily increase the power of labor, and 
should, therefore, increase wages and improve the condition 
of the laboring-classes. But this only where land is free 
to labor ; for labor cannot exert itself without land. No 
labor-saving inventions can enable us to make something 
out of nothing, or in any wise lessen our dependence upon 
land. They can merely add to the efficiency of labor in 



196 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

working up tlie raw materials drawn from land. There- 
fore, wherever land has been subjected to private owner- 
ship, the ultimate effect of labor-saving inventions, and of 
all improved processes and discoveries, is to enable land- 
owners to demand, and labor to pay, more for the use of 
land. Land becomes more valuable, but the wages of 
labor do not increase ; on the contrary, if there is any 
margin for possible reductions, they may be absolutely 
reduced. 

This we already see, and that in spite of the fact that a 
very important part of the effect of modern invention has 
been, by the improvement of transportation, to open up 
new land. What will be the effect of continued improve- 
ment in industrial processes when the land of this continent 
is all " fenced in," as in a few more years it will be, we 
may imagine if we consider what would have been the 
effect of labor-saving inventions upon Europe had no New 
World been opened. 

But it may be said that, in asserting that where land is 
private property the benefit of industrial improvements 
goes ultimately to landowners, I ignore facts, and attribute 
to one principle more importance than is its due, since it 
is clear that a great deal of the increased wealth arising 
from modern improvements has not gone to the owners 
of land, but to capitalists, manufacturers, speculators, 
railroad-owners, and the holders of other monopolies than 
that of land. It may be pointed out that the richest 
family in Europe are the Rothschilds, who are more loan- 
jobbers and bankers than landowners ; that the richest in 
America are the Vanderbilts, and not the Astors ; that Jay 
Grould got his money, not by securing land, but by bulling 
and bearing the stock-market, by robbing people with 
hired lawyers and purchased judges and corrupted legisla- 
tures. I may be asked if I attach no importance to the 
jobbery and robbery of the tariff, under pretense of 



WHAT WE MUST DO. 197 

" protecting American labor ; " to the Jugglery with the 
monetary system, from the wildcat State banks and 
national banking system down to the trade-dollar swindle ? 

In previous chapters I have given answers to all such 
objections ; but to repeat in concise form, my reply is, that 
I do not ignore any of these things, but that they in no 
wise invalidate the self-evident principle that land being 
private property, the ultimate benefit of all improvements 
in production must go to the landowners. To say that 
if a man continues to play at rondo the table will ulti- 
mately get his money, is not to say that in the meantime 
he may not have his pocket picked. Let me illustrate : 

Suppose an island, the soil of which is conceded to be 
the property of a few of the inhabitants. The rest of the 
inhabitants of this island must either hire land of these 
landowners, paying rent for it, or sell their labor to them, 
receiving wages. As population increases, the competition 
between the non-landowners for employment or the means 
of employment must increase rent and decrease wages 
until the non-landowners get merely a bare living, and the 
landholders get all the rest of the produce of the island. 
Now, suppose any improvement or invention made which 
will increase the efficiency of labor, it is manifest that, as 
soon as it becomes general, the competition between the 
non-landholders must give to the landholders all the 
benefit. No matter how great the improvement be, it can 
have but this ultimate result. If the improvements are 
so great that all the wealth the island can produce or that 
the landowners care for can be obtained with one-half the 
labor, they can let the other half of the laborers starve or 
evict them into the sea ; or if they are pious people of the 
conventional sort, who believe that God Almighty intended 
these laborers to live, though he did not provide any land 
for them to live on, they may support them as paupers or 
ship them off to some other country as the English govern- 



198 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

ment is shipping the " surplus " Irishmen, But whether 
they let them die or keep them alive, they would have no 
use for them, and, if improvement still went on, they 
would have use for less and less of them. 

This is the general principle. 

But in addition to this population of landowners and 
their tenants and laborers, let us suppose there are on the 
island a storekeeper, an inventor, a gambler and a pirate. 
To make our supposition conform to modern fashions, we 
will suppose a highly respectable gambler— one of the 
kind who endows colleges and subscribes to the conversion 
of the heathen— and a very gentlemanly pirate, who flies 
on his swift cruiser the ensign of a yacht club instead of 
the old rawhead and bloody-bones, but who, even more 
regularly and efficiently than the old-fashioned pirate, 
levies his toll. 

Let us suppose the storekeeper, the gambler and the 
pirate well established in business and making money. 
Along comes the inventor, and says : " I have an inven- 
tion which will greatly add to the efficiency of labor and 
enable you greatly to increase the produce of this island, 
so that there will be very much more to divide among you 
all; but, as a condition for telling you of it, I want you 
to agree that I shall have a royalty upon its use." This 
is agreed to, the invention is adopted, and does greatly 
increase the production of wealth. But it does not benefit 
the laborers. The competition between them still forces 
them to pay such high rent or take such low wages that 
they are no better off than before. They still barely live. 
But the whole benefit of the invention does not in this 
case go to the landowners. The inventor's royalty gives 
him a great income, while the storekeeper, the gambler 
and the pirate all find their incomes much increased. The 
incomes of each one of these four, we may readily suppose, 
are larger than any single one of the landowners, and 



WHAT WE MUST DO. 199 

their gains offer the most striking contrast to the poverty 
of the laborers, who are bitterly disappointed at not get- 
ting any share of the increased wealth that followed the 
improvement. Something they feel is wrong, and some 
among them even begin to murmur that the Creator of 
the island surely did not make it for the benefit of only a 
few of its inhabitants, and that, as the common creatures 
of the Creator, they, too, have some rights to the use of 
the son of the island. 

Suppose then some one to arise and say : ^' What is the 
use of discussing such abstractions as the land question, 
that cannot come into practical politics for many a day, 
and that can only excite dissension and general unpleas- 
antness, and that, moreover, savor of communism, which 
as you laborers, who have nothing but your few rags, very 
well know is a highly wicked and dangerous thing, mean- 
ing the robbery of widow women and orphans, and being 
opposed to religion ? Let us be practical. You laborers 
are poor and can scarcely get a living, because you are 
swindled by the storekeeper, taxed by the inventor, gouged 
by the gambler and robbed by the pirate. Landholders 
and non-landholders, our interests are in common as 
against these vampires. Let us unite to stop their exac- 
tions. The storekeeper makes a profit of from ten to fifty 
per cent, on all that he sells. Let us form a cooperative 
society, which will sell everything at cost and enable 
laborers to get rich by saving the storekeeper's profit on 
all that they use. As for the inventor, he has been already 
well enough paid. Let us stop his roj^'alty, and there wiU 
be so much more to divide between the landowners and 
the non-landowners. As for the gambler and the pirate, 
let us put a summary end to their proceedings and drive 
them off the island ! " 

Let us imagine a roar of applause, and these proposi- 
tions carried out. What then? Then the landowners 



200 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

would become so mueli the richer. The laborers would 
gain nothing, unless it might be in a clearer apprehension 
of the ultimate cause of their poverty. For although, by- 
getting rid of the storekeeper, the laborers might be able 
to live cheaper, the competition between them would soon 
force them to give up this advantage to the landowners 
by taking lower wages or giving higher rents. And so 
the elimination of the inventor's royalty, and of the pick- 
ings and stealings of the gambler and pirate, would only 
make land more valuable and increase the incomes of the 
landholders. The saving made by getting rid of the 
storekeeper, inventor, gambler and pirate would accrue 
to their benefit, as did the increase in production from the 
application of the invention. 

That all this is true we may see, as I have shown. The 
growth of the railroad system has, for instance, resulted 
in putting almost the whole transportation business of the 
country in the hands of giant monopolies, who, for the 
most part, charge '^ what the traffic will bear," and who 
frequently discriminate in the most outrageous way against 
localities. The effect where this is done, as is alleged in 
the complaints that are made, is to reduce the price of 
land. And all this might be remedied, without raising 
wages or improving the condition of labor. It would only 
make land more valuable— that is to say, in consideration 
of the saving effected in transportation, labor would have 
to pay a higher premium for land. 

So with all monopolies, and their name is legion. If 
all monopolies, save the monopoly of land, were abolished ; 
if, even, by means of cooperative societies, or other devices, 
the profits of exchange were saved, and goods passed from 
producer to consumer at the minimum of cost ; if govern- 
ment were reformed to the point of absolute purity and 
economy, nothing whatever would be done toward equali- 
zation in the distribution of wealth. The competition 



WHAT WE MUST DO. 201 

between laborers, wbo, having no rights in the land, 
cannot work without some one else's permission, would 
increase the value of land, and force wages to the point 
of bare subsistence. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not say that in the 
recognition of the equal and unalienable right of each 
human being to the natural elements from which life must 
be supported and wants satisfied, lies the solution of all 
social problems. I fully recognize the fact that even after 
we do this, much will remain to do. We might recognize 
the equal right to land, and yet tyranny and spoliation be 
continued. But whatever else we do, so long as we fail to 
recognize the equal right to the elements of nature, nothing 
will avail to remedy that unnatural inequality in the dis- 
tribution of wealth which is fraught with so much evil 
and danger. Reform as we may, until we make this 
fundamental reform our material progress can but tend to 
differentiate our people into the monstrously rich and the 
frightfully poor. Whatever be the increase of wealth, the 
masses will still be ground toward the point of bare sub- 
sistence — we must still have our great criminal classes, 
our paupers and our tramps, men and women driven to 
degradation and desperation from inability to make an 
honest living. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE FIRST GREAT REFORM. 

DO what we may, we can aecomplish notMng real and 
lasting until we secure to all the first of those equal 
and unalienable rights with which, as our Declaration of 
Independence has it, man is endowed by his Creator— the 
equal and unalienable right to the use and benefit of natu- 
ral opportunities. 

There are people who are always trying to find some 
mean between right and wrong— people who, if they were 
to see a man about to be unjustly beheaded, might insist 
that the proper thing to do would be to chop off his feet. 
These are the people who, beginning to recognize the impor- 
tance of the land question, propose in Ireland and England 
such measures as judicial valuations of rents and peasant 
proprietary, and in the United States, the reservation to 
actual settlers of what is left of the public lands, and the 
limitation of estates. 

Nothing whatever can be accomplished by such timid, 
illogical measures. If we would cure social disease we 
must go to the root. 

There is no use in talking of reserving what there may 
be left of our public domain to actual settlers. That would 
be merely a locking of the stable door after the horse had 
been stolen, and even if it were not, would avail nothing. 

There is no use in talking about restricting the amount 
of land any one man may hold. That, even if it were 



THE FIEST GREAT REFORM. 203 

practicable, were idle, and would not meet the difficulty. 
The ownership of an acre in a city may give more com- 
mand of the labor of others than the ownership of a hun- 
dred thousand acres in a sparsely settled district, and it is 
utterly impossible by any legal device to prevent the 
concentration of property so long as the general causes 
which irresistibly tend to the concentration of property 
remain untouched. So long as the wages tend to the point 
of a bare living for the laborer we cannot stop the tendency 
of property of all kinds to concentration, and this must 
be the tendency of wages until equal rights in the soil of 
their country are secured to all. "We can no more abolish 
industrial slavery by limiting the size of estates than we 
could abolish chattel slavery by putting a limit on the 
number of slaves a single slaveholder might own. In the 
one case as in the other, so far as such restrictions could 
be made operative they would only increase the difficulties 
of abolition by enlarging the class who would resist it. 

There is no escape from it. If we would save the 
Republic before social-inequality and political demoraliza- 
tion have reached the point when no salvation is possible, 
we must assert the principle of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, acknowledge the equal and unalienable rights 
which inhere in man by endowment of the Creator, and 
make land common property. 

If there seems anything strange in the idea that all men 
have equal and unalienable rights to the use of the earth, 
it is merely that habit can blind us to the most obvious 
truths. Slavery, polygamy, cannibalism, the flattening of 
children's heads, or the squeezing of their feet, seem per- 
fectly natural to those brought up where such institutions 
or customs exist. But, as a matter of fact, nothing is 
more repugnant to the natural perceptions of men than 
that land should be treated as subject to individual owner- 
ship, like things produced by labor. It is only among an 



204 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

insignificaiit fraction of the people who have lived on the 
earth that the idea that the earth itself could be made 
private property has ever obtained ; nor has it ever obtained 
save as the result of a long course of usurpation, tyranny 
and fraud. This idea reached development among the 
Romans, whom it corrupted and destroyed. It took many 
generations for it to make its way among our ancestors ; 
and it did not, in fact, reach full recognition until two 
centuries ago, when, in the time of Charles II., the feudal 
dues were shaken off by a landholders' parliament. We 
accepted it as we have accepted the aristocratic organiza- 
tion of our army and navy, and many other things, in 
which we have servilely followed European custom. Land 
being plenty and population sparse, we did not realize 
what it would mean when in two or three cities we should 
have the population of the thirteen colonies. But it is time 
that we should begin to think of it now, when we see 
ourselves confronted, in spite of our free political institu- 
tions, with all the problems that menace Europe— when, 
though our virgin soil is not yet quite fenced in, we have 
a "working-class," a "criminal class" and a "pauper 
class ; " when there are already thousands of so-called free 
citizens of the Republic who cannot by the hardest toil 
make a living for their families, and when we are, on the 
other hand, developing such monstrous fortunes as the 
world has not seen since great estates were eating out 
the heart of Rome. 

What more preposterous than the treatment of land as 
individual property % In every essential land differs from 
those things which being the product of human labor are 
rightfully property. It is the creation of God ; they are 
produced by man. It is fixed in quantity ; they may be 
increased inimitably. It exists, though generations come 
and go ; they in a little while decay and pass again into 
the elements. What more preposterous than that one 



THE FIEST GEEAT REFORM. 205 

tenant for a day of this rolling sphere slionld collect rent 
for it from his co-tenants, or sell to them for a price what 
was here ages before him and will be here ages after him ? 
What more preposterous than that we, living in New York 
city in this year, 1883, should be working for a lot of 
landlords who get the authority to live on our labor from 
some English king, dead and gone these centuries ? What 
more preposterous than that we, the present population of 
the United States, should presume to grant to our own 
people or to foreign capitalists the right to strip of their 
earnings American citizens of the next generation ? What 
more utterly preposterous than these titles to land? 
Although the whole people of the earth in one generation 
were to unite, they could no more sell title to land against 
the next generation than they could sell that generation. 
It is a self-evident truth, as Thomas Jefferson said, that 
the earth belongs in usufruct to the living. 

Nor can any defense of private property in land be made 
on the ground of expediency. On the contrary, look 
where you will, and it is evident that the private owner- 
ship of land keeps land out of use ; that the speculation 
it engenders crowds population where it ought to be more 
diffused, diffuses it where it ought to be closer together ; 
compels those who wish to improve to pay away a large 
part of their capital, or mortgage their labor for years 
before they are permitted to improve ; prevents men from 
going to work for themselves who would gladly do so, 
crowding them into deadly competition with each other 
for the wages of employers ; and enormously restricts the 
production of wealth while causing the grossest inequality 
in its distribution. 

No assumption can be more gratuitous than that con- 
stantly made that absolute ownership of land is necessary 
to the improvement and proper use of land. What is 
necessary to the best use of land is the security of improve- 



206 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

ments— tlie assurance that the labor and capital expended 
upon it shall enjoy their reward. This is a verj^ different 
thing from the absolute ownership of land. Some of the 
finest buildings in New York are erected upon leased 
ground. Nearly the whole of London and other English 
cities, and great parts of Philadelphia and Baltimore, are 
so built. All sorts of mines are opened and operated on 
leases. In California and Nevada the most costly mining 
operations, involving the expenditure of immense amounts 
of capital, were undertaken upon no better security than 
the mining regulations, which gave no ownership of the 
land, but only guaranteed possession as long as the mines 
were worked. 

If shafts can be sunk and tunnels can be run, and the 
most costly machinery can be put up on public land on 
mere security of possession, why could not improvements 
of all kinds be made on that security ? If individuals will 
use and improve land belonging to other individuals, why 
would they not use and improve land belonging to the 
whole people ? What is to prevent land owned by Trinity 
Church, by the Sailors' Snug Harbor, by the Astors or 
Rhinelanders, or any other corporate or individual owners, 
from being as well improved and used as now, if the 
ground-rents, instead of going to corporations or individ- 
uals, went into the public treasury ? 

In point of fact, if land were treated as the common 
property of the whole people, it would be far more readily 
improved than now, for then the improver would get the 
whole benefit of his improvements. Under the present 
system, the price that must be paid for land operates as 
a powerful deterrent to improvement. And when the 
improver has secured land either by purchase or by lease, 
he is taxed upon his improvements, and heavily taxed in 
various ways upon all that he uses. Were land treated 
as the property of the whole people, the ground-rent 



THE FIEST GREAT REFORM. 207 

accruing to the community would suffice for public pur- 
poses, and all other taxation might be dispensed with. 
The improver could more easily get land to improve, and 
would retain for himself the full benefit of his improve- 
ments exempt from taxation. 

To secure to all citizens their equal right to the land on 
which they live, does not mean, as some of the ignorant 
seem to suppose, that every one must be given a farm, 
and city land be cut up into little pieces. It would be 
impossible to secure the equal rights of all in that way, 
even if such division were not in itself impossible. In 
a small and primitive community of simple industries 
and habits, such as that Moses legislated for, substantial 
equality may be secured by allotting to each family an 
equal share of the land and making it unalienable. Or, as 
among our rude ancestors in western Europe, or in such 
primitive society as the village communities of Russia and 
India, substantial equality may be secured by periodical 
allotment or cultivation in common. Or in sparse popu- 
lations, such as the early New England colonies, substantial 
equality may be secured by giving to each family its town- 
lot and its seed-lot, holding the rest of the land as town- 
land or common. But among a highly civilized and rapidly 
growing population, with changing centers, with great 
cities and minute division of industry, and a complex 
system of production and exchange, such rude devices 
become ineffective and impossible. 

Must we therefore consent to inequality— must we 
therefore consent that some shall monopolize what is the 
common heritage of all ? Not at aU. If two men find a 
diamond, they do not march to a lapidary to have it cut 
in two. If three sons inherit a ship, they do not proceed 
to saw her into three pieces ; nor yet do they agree that if 
this cannot be done equal division is impossible. Nor yet 
is there no other way to secure the rights of the owners of 



208 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

a railroad than by breaking up track, engines, cars and 
depots into as many separate bits as there are stockholders. 
And so it is not necessary, in order to secure equal rights 
to land, to make an equal division of land. All that it 
is necessary to do is to collect the ground-rents for the 
common benefit. 

Nor, to take ground-rents for the common benefit, is it 
necessary that the state should actually take possession of 
the land and rent it out from year to year, or from term 
to term, as some ignorant people suppose. It can be done 
in a much more simple and easy manner by means of the 
existing machinery of taxation. All it is necessary to do 
is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight 
of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of 
improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public 
benefit. 

In this simple way, without increasing governmental 
machinery, but, on the contrary, greatly simplifying it, we 
could make land common property. And in doing this 
we could abolish all other taxation, and still have a great 
and steadily increasing surplus— a growing common fund, 
in the benefits of which all might share, and in the manage- 
ment of which there would be such a direct and general 
interest as to afford the strongest guaranties against mis- 
appropriation or waste. Under this system no one could 
afford to hold land he was not using, and land not in use 
would be thrown open to those who wished to use it, at 
once relieving the labor market and giving an enormous 
stimulus to production and improvement, while land in 
use would be paid for according to its value, irrespective 
of the improvements the user might make. On these he 
would not be taxed. AU that his labor could add to the 
common wealth, all that his prudence could save, would 
be his own, instead of, as now, subjecting him to fine. Thus 
would the sacred right of property be acknowledged by 
securing to each the reward of his exertio© 



THE FIEST GREAT EEFORM. 209 

Practically, then, the greatest, the most fundamental of 
all reforms, the reform which will make all other reforms 
easier, and without which no other reform will avail, is to 
be reached by concentrating all taxation into a tax upon 
the value of land, and making that heavy enough to take 
as near as may be the whole ground-rent for common 
purposes. 

To those who have never studied the subject, it will 
seem ridiculous to propose as the greatest and most far- 
reaching of all reforms a mere fiscal change. But whoever 
has followed the train of thought through which in. pre- 
ceding chapters I have endeavored to lead, will see that 
in this simple proposition is involved the greatest of social 
revolutions— a revolution compared with which that which 
destroj^ed ancient monarchy in France, or that which 
destroyed chattel slavery in our Southern States, were as 
nothing. 

In a book such as this, intended for the casual reader, 
who lacks inclination to follow the close reasoning neces- 
sary to show the full relation of this seemingly simple 
reform to economic laws, I cannot exhibit its full force, 
but I may point to some of the more obvious of its effects. 
r To appropriate ground-rent * to public uses by means of 
taxation would permit the abolition of all the taxation 
which now presses so heavily upon labor and capital. This 
would enormously increase the production of wealth by 
the removal of restrictions and by adding to the incentives 
to production. 

It would at the same time enormously increase the pro- 
duction of wealth by throwing open natural opportunities. 
It would utterly destroy land monopoly by making the 
holding of land unprofitable to any but the user. There 

* I use the term ground-rent because the proper economic term, 
rent, might not be understood by those who are in the habit of using 
it iu its common sense, which applies to the income from buildings 
and improvements, as well as land. 



210 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

would be no temptation to any one to liold land in expec- 
tation of future increase iu its value when that increase 
was certain to be demanded in taxes. No one could afford 
to hold valuable land idle when the taxes upon it would 
be as heavy as they would be were it put to the fullest use. 
Thus speculation in land would be utterly destroyed, and 
land not in use would become free to those who wished 
to use it. 

The enormous increase in production which would result 
from thus throwing open the natural means and oppor- 
tunities of production, while at the same time removing 
the ta-xation which now hampers, restricts and fines pro- 
duction, would enormously augment the annual fund from 
which all incomes are drawn. It would at the same time 
make the distribution of wealth much more equal. That 
great part of this fund which is now taken by the owners 
of land, not as a return for anj^hing by which they add 
to production, but because they have appropriated as their 
own the natural means and opportunities of production, 
and which as material progress goes on, and the value of 
land rises, is constantly becoming larger and larger, would 
be virtually divided among all, by being utilized for com- 
mon purposes. The removal of restrictions upon labor, 
and the opening of natural opportunities to labor, would 
make labor free to employ itself. Labor, the producer of 
all wealth, could never become " a drug in the market " 
while desii'e for any form of wealth was unsatisfied. With 
the natural opportunities of employment thrown open 
to all, the spectacle of willing men seeking vainly for 
employment could not be witnessed; there could be no 
surplus of unemployed labor to beget that cutthroat com- 
petition of laborers for employment which crowds wages 
down to the cost of merely living. Instead of the one- 
sided competition of workmen to find employment, em- 
ployers would compete with each other to obtain workmen. 



THE FIRST GREAT REFORM. 211 

There would be no need of combinations to raise or main- 
tain wages ; for wages, instead of tending to the lowest 
point at which laborers can live, would tend to the highest 
point which employers could pay, and thus, instead of 
getting but a mere fraction of his earnings, the workman 
would get the f uU. return of his labor, leaving to the skill, 
foresight and capital of the employer those additional 
earnings that are justly their due. 

The equalization in the distribution of wealth that would 
thus result would effect immense economies and greatly 
add to productive power. The cost of the idleness, pau- 
perism and crime that spring from poverty would be saved 
to the community J the increased mobility of labor, the 
increased intelligence of the masses, that would result 
from this equalized distribution of wealth, the greater 
incentive to invention and to the use of improved processes 
that would result from the increase in wages, would enor- 
mously increase production. 

To abolish all taxes save a tax upon the value of land 
would at the same time greatly simplify the machinery 
and expenses of government, and greatly reduce govern- 
ment expenses. An army of Custom-House officers, and 
internal revenue officials, and license collectors and asses- 
sors, clerks, accountants, spies, detectives, and government 
employees of every description, could be dispensed with. 
The corrupting effect of indirect taxation would be taken 
out of our politics. The rings and combinations now 
interested in keeping up taxation would cease to contribute 
money for the debauching of voters and to beset the law- 
making power with their lobbyists. We should get rid of 
the fraud and false swearing, of the bribery and subor- 
nation which now attend the collection of so much of 
our public revenues. We should get rid of the demorali- 
zation that proceeds from laws which prohibit actions in 
themselves harmless, punish men for crimes which the 



212 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

moral sense does not condemn, and offer a constant pre- 
mium to evasion. ^' Land lies out of doors." It cannot 
be hid or carried off. Its value can be ascertained with 
greater ease and exactness than the value of anything else, 
and taxes upon that value can be collected with absolute 
certainty and at the minimum of expense. To rely upon 
land values for the whole public revenue would so simplify 
government, would so eliminate incentives to corruption, 
that we could safely assume as governmental functions 
the management of telegraphs and railroads, and safely 
apply the increasing surplus to securing such common 
benefits and providing such public conveniences as ad- 
vancing civilization may call for. 

And in thinking of what is possible in the way of the 
management of common concerns for the common benefit, 
not only is the great simplification of government which 
would result from the reform I have suggested to be con- 
sidered, but the higher moral tone that would be given 
to social life by the equalization of conditions and the 
abolition of poverty. The greed of wealth, which makes 
it a business motto that every man is to be treated as 
though he were a rascal, and induces despair of getting 
in places of public trust men who will not abuse them for 
selfish ends, is but the reflection of the fear of want. Men 
trample over each other from the frantic dread of being 
trampled upon, and the admu-ation with which even the 
unscrupulous money-getter is regarded springs from 
habits of thought engendered by the fierce struggle for 
existence to which the most of us are obliged to give up 
our best energies. But when no one feared want, when 
every one felt assured of his ability to make an easy and 
independent living for himself and his familj:-, that popular 
admiration which now spurs even the rich man still to add 
to his wealth would be given to other things than the get- 
ting of money. We should learn to regard the man who 



THE FIEST GEEAT EEFOEM. 213 

strove to get more than lie could use, as a fool— as indeed 
he is. 

He must have eyes only for the mean and vile, who has 
mixed with men without realizing that selfishness and 
greed and vice and crime are largely the result of social 
conditions which bring out the bad qualities of human 
nature and stunt the good; without realizing that there 
is even now among men patriotism and virtue enough to 
secure us the best possible management of public affairs 
if our social and political adjustments enabled us to utilize 
those qualities. Who has not known poor men who might 
safely be trusted with untold millions? Who has not 
met with rich men who retained the most ardent sympathy 
with their fellows, the warmest devotion to all that would 
benefit their kind ? Look to-day at our charities, hopeless 
of permanent good though they may be ! They at least 
show the existence of unselfish sympathies, capable, if 
rightly directed, of the largest results. 

It is no mere fiscal reform that I propose ; it is a con- 
forming of the most important social adjustments to 
natural laws. To those who have never given thought to 
the matter, it may seem irreverently presumptuous to say 
that it is the evident intent of the Creator that land values 
should be the subject of taxation ; that rent should be 
utihzed for the benefit of the entire community. Yet 
to whoever does think of it, to say this will appear no 
more presumptuous than to say that the Creator has 
intended men to walk on their feet, and not on their 
hands. Man in his social relations is as much included 
in the creative scheme as man in his physical relations. 
Just as certainly as the fish was intended to swim in the 
water, and the bird to fly through the air, and monkeys 
to live in trees, and moles to burrow underground, was 
man intended to live with his fellows. He is by nature a 
social animal. And the creative scheme must embrace 



214 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

the life and development of society, as truly as it embraces 
the life and development of the individual. Our civiliza- 
tion cannot carry us beyond the domain of law. Rail- 
roads, telegraphs and labor-saving machinery are no more 
accidents than are flowers and trees. 

Man is driven by his instincts and needs to form society. 
Society, thus formed, has certain needs and functions for 
which revenue is required. These needs and functions 
increase with social development, requiring a larger and 
larger revenue. Now, experience and analogy, if not the 
instinctive perceptions of the human mind, teach us that 
there is a natural way of satisfying every natural want. 
And if human society is included in nature, as it surely 
is, this must apply to social wants as well as to the wants 
of the individual, and there must be a natural or right 
method of taxation, as there is a natural or right method 
of walking. 

We know, beyond peradventure, that the natural or 
right way for a man to walk is on his feet, and not on his 
hands. We know this of a surety— because the feet are 
adapted to walking, while the hands are not 5 because in 
walking on the feet all the other organs of the body are 
free to perform their proper functions, while in walking 
on the hands they are not; because a man can walk on 
his feet with ease, convenience and celerity, while no 
amount of training will enable him to walk on his hands 
save awkwardlj^, slowly and painfuUy. In the same way 
we may know that the natural or right way of raising the 
revenues which are required by the needs of society is by 
the taxation of land values. The value of land is in its 
nature and relations adapted to purposes of taxation, just 
as the feet in their nature and relations are adapted to 
the purposes of walking. The value of land * only arises 

* Value, it must always be remembered, is a totally different thing 
from utility. From the confounding of these two different ideas 



THE FIRST GEEAT REFORM. 215 

as in the integration of society the need for some public 
or common revenue begins to be felt. It increases as the 
development of society goes on, and as larger and larger 
revenues are therefore required. Taxation upon land 
values does not lessen the individual incentive to produc- 
tion and accumulation, as do other methods of taxation ; 
on the contrary, it leaves perfect freedom to productive 
forces, and prevents restrictions upon production from 
arising. It does not foster monopolies, and cause unjust 
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, as do other 
taxes ; on the contrary, it has the effect of breaking down 
monopoly and equalizing the distribution of wealth. It 
can be collected with greater certainty and economy than 
any other tax; it does not beget the evasion, corruption 
and dishonesty that flow from other taxes. In short, it 
conforms to every economic and moral requirement. 
What can be more in accordance with justice than that 
the value of land, which is not created by individual effort, 
but arises from the existence and growth of society, should 
be taken by society for social needs ? 

In trying, in a previous chapter, to imagine a world in 
which natural material and opportunities were free as air, 
I said that such a world as we find ourselves in is best for 
men who will use the intelligence with which man has 
been gifted. So, evidently, it is. The very laws which 
cause social injustice to result in inequality, suffering and 
degradation are in their nature beneficent. All this evil 
is the wrong side of good that might be. 

Man is more than an animal. And the more we consider 
the constitution of this world in which we find ourselves, 
the more clearly we see that its constitution is such as to 
develop more than animal life. If the purpose for which 

much error and confusion arise. No matter how useful it may be, 
nothing has a value until some one is willing to give labor or the 
produce of labor for it. 



216 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

this world existed were merely to enable animal man to 
eat, drink and comfortably clothe and house himself for 
his little day, some such world as I have previously endea- 
vored to imagine would be best. But the purpose of this 
world, so far at least as man is concerned, is evidently the 
development of moral and intellectual, even more than of 
animal, powers. Whether we consider man himself or 
his relations to nature external to him, the substantial 
truth of that bold declaration of the Hebrew scriptures, 
that man has been created in the image of God, forces 
itself upon the mind. 

If all the material things needed by man could be pro- 
duced equally well at all points on the earth's surface, it 
might seem more convenient for man the animal, but how 
would he have risen above the animal level ? As we see 
in the history of social development, commerce has been 
and is the great civilizer and educator. The seemingly 
infinite diversities in the capacity of different parts of the 
earth's surface lead to that exchange of productions which 
is the most powerful agent in preventing isolation, in 
breaking down prejudice, in increasing knowledge and 
widening thought. These diversities of nature, which 
seemingly increase with our knowledge of nature's powers, 
like the diversities in the aptitudes of individuals and 
communities, which similarly increase with social develop- 
ment, call forth powers and give rise to pleasures which 
could never arise had man been placed, like an ox, in a 
boundless field of clover. The '^ international law of God " 
which we fight with our tariffs— so short-sighted are the 
selfish prejudices of men— is the law which stimulates 
mental and moral progress ; the law to which civilization 
is due. 

And so, when we consider the phenomenon of rent, it 
reveals to us one of those beautiful and beneficent adapta- 
tions, in which more than in anything else the human 



THE FIEST GREAT REFORM. 217 

mind recognizes evidences of Mind infinitely greater, and 
catches glimpses of the Master Workman. 

This is the law of rent : As individuals come together 
in communities, and society grows, integrating more and 
more its individual members, and making general interests 
and general conditions of more and more relative impor- 
tance, there arises, over and above the value which indi- 
viduals can create for themselves, a value which is created 
by the community as a whole, and which, attaching to 
land, becomes tangible, definite and capable of computa- 
tion and appropriation. As society grows, so grows this 
value, which springs from and represents in tangible form 
what society as a whole contributes to production, as 
distinguished from what is contributed by individual exer- 
tion. By virtue of natural law in those aspects which it 
is the purpose of the science we call political economy to 
discover— as it is the purpose of the sciences which we call 
chemistry and astronomy to discover other aspects of 
natural law — all social advance necessarily contributes 
to the increase of this common value ; to the growth of 
this common fund. 

Here is a provision made by natural law for the increas- 
ing needs of social growth ; here is an adaptation of nature 
by virtue of which the natural progress of society is a 
progress toward equality, not toward inequality; a cen- 
tripetal force tending to unity, growing out of and ever 
balancing a centrifugal force tending to diversity. Here 
is a fund belonging to society as a whole from which, 
without the degradation of alms, private or public, pro- 
vision can be made for the weak, the helpless, the aged ; 
from which provision can be made for the common wants 
of all as a matter of common right to each, and by the 
utilization of which society, as it advances, may pass, by 
natural methods and easy stages, from a rude association 
for purposes of defense and police, into a cooperative asso- 



218 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

elation, in wMch combined power guided by combined 
intelligence can give to each more than Ms own exertions 
multiplied manyfold could produce. 

By making land private property, by permitting indi- 
viduals to appropriate this fund which nature plainly 
intended for the use of all, we throw the children's bread 
to the dogs of Greed and Lust; we produce a primary 
inequality which gives rise in every direction to other 
tendencies to inequality ; and from this perversion of the 
good gifts of the Creator, from this ignoring and defying 
of his social laws, there arise in the very heart of our 
civilization those horrible and monstrous things that 
betoken social putrefaction. 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE AMERICAN FARMER. 

IT is frequently asserted tliat no proposition for tlie 
recognition of common rights to land can become a 
practical question in the United States because of the 
opposition of the farmers who own their own farms, and 
who constitute the great body of our population, wielding 
when they choose to exert it a dominating political power. 

That new ideas make their way more slowly among an 
agricultural population than among the population of cities 
and towns is true— though, I think, in less degree true of 
the United States than of any other country.' But beyond 
this, it seems to me that those who look upon the small 
farmers of the United States as forming an impregnable 
bulwark to private property in land very much miscalcu- 
late. 

Even admitting, which I do not, that farmers could be 
relied upon to oppose measures fraught with great general 
benefits if seemingly opposed to their smaller personal 
interests, it is not true that such measures as I have sug- 
gested are opposed to the interests of the great body of 
farmers. On the contrary, these measures would be as 
clearly to their advantage as to the advantage of wage- 
workers. The average farmer may at first start at the 
idea of virtually making land common property, but given 
time for discussion and reflection, and those who are 
already trying to persuade him that to put all taxation 



220 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

upon the value of land would be to put aU taxation upon 
liim, have as little chance of success as the slaveholders 
had of persuading their negroes that the Northern armies 
were bent on kidnapping and selling them in Cuba. The 
average farmer can read, write and cipher — and on matters 
connected with his own interests ciphers pretty closely. 
He is not out of the great currents of thought, though they 
may affect him more slowly, and he is anything but a 
contented peasant, ignorantly satisfied with things as they 
are, and impervious to ideas of change. Already dissatis- 
fied, he is becoming more so. His hard and barren life 
seems harder and more barren as contrasted with the 
excitement and luxury of cities, of which he constantly 
reads even if he does not frequently see, and the great 
fortunes accumulated by men who do nothing to add to 
the stock of wealth arouse his sense of injustice. He is 
at least beginning to feel that he bears more than his fair 
share of the burdens of society, and gets less than his fair 
share of its benefits ; and though the time for his awaken- 
ing has not yet come, his thought, with the decadence of 
old political issues, is more and more turning to economic 
and social questions. 

It is clear that the change in taxation which I propose 
as the means whereby equal rights to the soil may be 
asserted and maintained, would be to the advantage of 
farmers who are working land belonging to others, of 
those whose farms are virtually owned by mortgagees, and 
of those who are seeking farms. And not only do the 
farmers whose opposition is relied upon — those who own 
their own farms — form, as I shall hereafter show, but a 
decreasing minority of the agricultural vote, and a small 
and even more rapidly decreasing minority of the aggre- 
gate vote ; but the change would be so manifestly to the 
advantage of the smaller farmers who constitute the great 
body, that when they come to understand it they will 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 221 

favor instead of opposing it. The farmer who cultivates 
his own small farm with his own hands is a landowner, 
it is true, but he is in greater degree a laborer, and in his 
ownership of stock, improvements, tools, etc., a capitalist. 
It is from his labor, aided by this capital, rather than from 
any advantage represented by the value of his land, that 
he derives his living. His main interest is that of a pro- 
ducer, not that of a landowner. 

There lived in Dublin, some years ago, a gentleman 
named Murphy — ''Cozy" Murphy, they called him, for 
short, and because he was a very comfortable sort of a 
Murphy. Cozy Murphy owned land in Tipperary ; but as 
he had an agent in Tipperary to collect his rents and evict 
his tenants when they did not pay, he himself lived in 
Dublin, as being the more comfortable place. And he 
concluded, at length, that the most comfortable place in 
Dublin, in fact the most comfortable place in the whole 
world, was— in bed. So he went to bed and stayed there 
for nearly eight years ; not because he was at all ill, but 
because he liked it. He ate his dinners, and drank his 
wine, and smoked his cigars, and read, and played cards, 
and received visitors, and verified his agent's accounts, 
and drew checks— all in bed. After eight years' lying in 
bed, he grew tired of it, got up, dressed himself, and for 
some years went around like other people, and then died. 
But his family were just as well off as though he had never 
gone to bed— in fact, they were better off ; for while his 
income was not a whit diminished by his going to bed, his 
expenses were. 

This was a typical landowner— a landowner pure and 
simple. Now let the working farmer consider what would 
become of himself and family if he and his boys were to 
go to bed and stay there, and he will realize how much 
his interests as a laborer exceed his interests as a land- 
owner. 



222 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

It requires no grasp of abstractions for tlie working 
farmer to see that to abolish all taxation, save upon the 
value of land, would be really to his interest, no matter 
how it might affect larger landholders. Let the working 
farmer consider how the weight of indirect taxation falls 
upon him without his having power to shift it off upon 
any one else ; how it adds to the price of nearly everything 
he has to buy, without adding to the price of what he has 
to sell ; how it compels him to contribute to the support 
of government in far greater proportion to what he pos- 
sesses than it does those who are much richer, and he wUl 
see that by the substitution of direct for indirect taxation, 
he would be largely the gainer. Let him consider further, 
and he will see that he would be still more largely the 
gainer if direct taxation were confined to the value of land. 
The land of the working farmer is improved land, and 
usually the value of the improvements and of the stock 
used in cultivating it bears a very high proportion to the 
value of the bare land. Now, as all valuable land is not 
improved as is that of the working farmer, as there is 
much more of valuable land than of improved land, to 
substitute for the taxation now levied upon improvements 
and stock, a tax upon the naked value of land, irrespective 
of improvements, would be manifestly to the advantage 
of the owners of improved land, and especially of small 
owners, the value of whose improvements bears a much 
greater ratio to the value of their land than is the case 
with larger owners; and who, as one of the effects of 
treating improvements as a proper subject of taxation, 
are taxed far more heavily, even upon the value of their 
land, than are larger owners. 

The working farmer has only to look about him to 
realize this. Near by his farm of eighty or one hundred 
and sixty acres he will find tracts of five hundred or a 
thousand, or, in some places, tens of thousands of acres, 



THE AMEEICAN FARMER, 223 

of equally valuable land, on which the improvements, 
stock, tools and household effects are much less in propor- 
tion than on his own small farm, or which may be totally 
unimproved and unused. In the vOlages he will find acre, 
half-acre and quarter-acre lots, unimproved or slightly 
improved, which are more valuable than his whole farm. 
If he looks further, he wiU see tracts of mineral land, 
or land with other superior natural advantages, having 
immense value, yet on which the taxable improvements 
amount to httle or nothing; while, when he looks to the 
great cities, he will find vacant lots, twenty-five by one 
hundred feet, worth more than a whole section of agricul- 
tural land such as his ; and as he goes toward their centers 
he will find most magnificent buildings less valuable than 
the ground on which they stand, and block after block 
where the land would sell for more per front foot than 
his whole farm. Manifestly to put all taxes on the value 
of land would be to lessen relatively and absolutely the 
taxes the working farmer has to pay. 

So far from the effect of placing aU taxes upon the 
value of land being to the advantage of the towns at the 
expense of the agricultural districts, the very reverse of 
this is obviously true. The great increase of land values 
is in the cities, and with the present tendencies of growth 
this must continue to be the case. To place all taxes on 
the value of land would be to reduce the taxation of agri- 
cultural districts relatively to the taxation of towns and 
cities. And this would be only just ; for it is not alone 
the presence of their own populations which gives value 
to the land of towns and cities, but the presence of the 
more scattered agricultural population, for whom they 
constitute industrial, commercial and financial centers. 

While at first blush it may seem to the farmer that to 
abolish all taxes upon other things than the value of land 
would be to exempt the richer inhabitants of cities from 



224 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

taxation, and unduly to tax him, discussion and reflection 
will certainly show him that the reverse is the case. Per- 
sonal property is not, never has been, and never can be, 
fairly taxed. The rich man always escapes more easily 
than the man who has but little; the city, more easily 
than the country. Taxes which add to prices bear upon 
the inhabitants of sparsely settled districts with as much 
weight, and in many cases with much more weight, than 
upon the inhabitants of great cities. Taxes upon improve- 
ments manifestly faU more heavily upon the working 
farmer, a great part of the value of whose farm consists 
of the value of improvements, than upon the owners of 
valuable unimproved land, or upon those whose land, as 
that of cities, bears a higher relation in value to the 
improvements. 

The truth is, that the working farmer would be an 
immense gainer by the change. Where he would have to 
pay more taxes on the value of his land, he would be 
released from the taxes now levied on his stock and 
improvements, and from all the indirect taxes that now 
weigh so heavily upon him. And as the effect of taxing 
unimproved land as heavily as though it were improved 
would be to compel mere holders to sell, and to destroy 
mere speculative values, the farmer in sparsely settled 
districts would have little or no taxes to pay. It would 
not be until equally good land all about him was in use, 
and he had aU the advantages of a weU-settled neighbor- 
hood, that his taxes would be more than nominal. 

What the farmer who owns his own farm would lose 
would be the selling value of his land, but its usefulness 
to him would be as great as before— greater than before, 
in fact, as he would get larger returns from his labor 
upon it; and as the selling value of other land would be 
similarly affected, this loss would not make it harder for 
him to get another farm if he wished to move, while it 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 225 

would be easier for him to settle Ms children or to get 
more land if he could advantageously cultivate more. The 
loss would be nominal; the gain would be real. It is 
better for the small farmer, and especially for the small 
farmer with a growing family, that labor should be high 
than that land should be high. Paradoxical as it may 
appear, small landowners do not profit by the rise in the 
value of land. On the contrary they are extinguished. 
But before speaking of this let me show how much mis- 
apprehension there is in the assumption that the small 
independent farmers constitute, and will continue to con- 
stitute, the majority of the American people. 

Agriculture is the primitive occupation ; the farmer is 
the American pioneer; and even in those cases, compara- 
tively unimportant, where settlement is begun in the 
search for the precious metals, it does not become perma- 
nent until agriculture in some of its branches takes root. 
But as population increases and industrial development 
goes on, the relative importance of agriculture diminishes. 
That the non-agricultural population of the United States 
is steadily and rapidly gaining on the agricultural popula- 
tion is of course obvious. According to the census report 
the urban population of the United States was in 1790 
but 3.3 per cent, of the whole population, while in 1880 it 
had risen to 22.5 per cent.* Agriculture is yet the largest 
occupation, but in the aggregate other occupations much 
exceed it. According to the census, which, unsatisfactory 
as it is, is yet the only authority we have, the number of 

* It is an illustration of the carelessness with which the census 
reports have been shoveled together, that although the Compendium 
(Table V) gives the urban population, no information is given as to 
what is meant by urban population. The only clue given the in- 
quirer is that the urban population is stated to be contained in 286 
cities. Following up this clue through other tables, I infer that the 
population of towns and cities of over 8000 people is meant. 



226 SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. 

persons engaged in agriculture in 1880 was 7,670,493 out 
of 17,392,099 returned as engaged in gainful occupations 
of aU kinds. Or, if we take the number of adidt males as 
a better comparison of political power, we may find, with 
a little figuring, that the returns show 6,491,116 males of 
sixteen years and over engaged in agriculture, against 
7,422,639 engaged in other occupations. According to 
these figures the agricultural vote is already in a clear 
minority in the United States, whUe the preponderance 
of the non-agricultural vote, already great, is steadily and 
rapidly increasing.* 

But whUe the agricultural population of the United 
States is thus already in a minority, the men who own 
their own farms are already in a minority in the agricul- 
tural population. According to the census the number of 
farms and plantations in the United States in 1880 was 
4,008,907. The number of tenant farmers, paying money 
rents or share rents, is given by one of the census bulletins 
at 1,024,601. This would leave but 2,984,306 nominal 
owners of farms, out of the 7,679,493 persons employed 
in agriculture. The real owners of their farms must be 
greatly less even than this. The most common form of 
agricultural tendency in the United States is not that of 
money or share rent, but of mortgage. What proportion 
of American farms occupied by their nominal owners are 
under mortgage we can only guess. But there can be 
little doubt that the number of mortgaged farms must 
largely exceed the number of rented farms, and it may 
not be too high an estimate to put the number of mort- 

* Comparing the returns as to occupations for 1870 with 1880, it 
will be seen that while during the last decade the increase of persons 
engaged in agriculture has been only 29.5 per cent., in personal and 
professional services the increase has been 51.7 per cent., in trade 
and transportation, 51.9 per cent., and in manufacturing, mechanical 
and mining industries, 41.7 per cent. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 227 

gaged farms at one-half the number of nnrented ones * 
However this may be, it is certain that the farmers who 
really own their farms are but a minority of farmers, and 
a small minority of those engaged in agriculture. 

Further than this, all the tendencies of the time are to 
the extinction of the typical American farmer— the man 
who cultivates his own acres with his own hands. This 
movement has only recently begun, but it is going on, and 
must go on, under present conditions, with increasing 
rapidity. The remarkable increase in the large farms 
and diminution in the small ones, shown by the analysis 
of the census figures which will be found in the Appendix, 
is but evidence of the fact— too notorious to need the 
proof of figures— that the tendency to concentration, which 
in so many other branches of industry has substituted the 
factory for self -employing workmen, has reached agricul- 
ture. One invention after another has already given the 

* Could the facts be definitely ascertained, I have not the least 
doubt that they would show that at least fifty per cent, of the small 
farm-ownerships in the older States are merely nominal. That that 
number, at least, of the small farmers in those States are so deeply 
in debt, so covered by mortgages, that their supreme effort is to pay 
the constantly accruing interest, that a roof may be kept over the 
heads of the family— an effort that can have but the one ending. 

In the newer States is found a similar condition of things. The 
only difference is, that there the small farmer is usually compelled 
to commence with what, to him, is a mountain of debt. He must 
obtain his land upon deferred payments, drawing interest, and can 
obtain no title until those deferred payments, with the interest, are 
paid in full. He must also obtain his farm implements on part credit, 
with interest, for which he mortgages his crops. Credit must help 
him to his farm stock, his hovel, his seed, his food, his clothing. 
With this load of debt must the small farmer in the newer States 
commence, if he is not a capitalist, or he cannot even make a begin- 
ning. With such a commencement the common ending is not long 
in being found. 

In traveling through those sections, one of the most notable things 
that meets the attention of the observer is the great number of pub- 



228 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

large farmer a crushing advantage over the small farmer, 
and invention is still going on * And it is not merely in 
the making of his crops, but in their transportation and 
marketing, and in the purchase of his supplies, that the 
large producer in agriculture gains an advantage over the 
small one. To talk, as some do, about the bonanza farms 
breaking up in a little while into small homesteads, is as 
foolish as to talk of the great shoe-factory giving way 
again to journeymen shoemakers with their lap-stones 
and awls. The bonanza farm and the great wire-fenced 
stock-ranch have come to stay while present conditions 
last. If they show themselves first on new land, it is 
because there is on new land the greatest freedom of 
development, but the tendency exists wherever modern 
industrial influences are felt, and is showing itself in the 
British Isles as well as in our older States.t 

lications, everywhere met with, devoted exclusively to the advertising 
of small farm holdings, more or less improved, that are for sale. 
One is almost forced to the conclusion that the entire class of small 
farmers are compelled, from some cause, to find the best and quickest 
market that can he obtained for all that they possess. 

The entire agricultural regions of our country are crowded with 
loan agents, representing capital from all the great money centers 
of the world, who are making loans and taking mortgages upon the 
farms to an amount that, in aggregate, appears to be almost beyond 
calculation. In this movement the local capitalists, lawyers and 
traders appear as active co-workers.— iant^ and Labor in the United 
States, by William Godwin Moody, New York, 1883, p. 85. 

* One of the most important agricultural inventions yet made is 
just announced in the long-sought cotton-picker. If this machine 
will do what is said to have been already demonstrated, it must revo- 
lutionize the industry of the cotton States, and produce as far-reach- 
ing social and political effects as the invention of the cotton-gin, 
which revived and extended negro slavery in the United States, and 
made it an aggressive political power. 

t The persistence of small properties in some parts of the con- 
tinent of Europe is due, I take it, to the prevalence of habits differing 
from those of the people of English speech, and to the fact that 
modem tendencies are not yet felt there as strongly. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 229 

This tendency means the extirpation of the typical 
American farmer, who with his own hands and the aid of 
his boys cultivates his own small farm. When a Brooklyn 
lawyer or Boston banker can take a run in a palace-car 
out to the New Northwest ; buy some sections of land ; 
contract for having it broken up, seeded, reaped and 
threshed ; leave on it a superintendent, and make a profit 
on his first year's crop of from six to ten thousand dollars 
a section, what chance has the emigrant farmer of the old 
type who comes toiling along in the wagon which contains 
his wife and children, and the few traps that with his team 
constitute his entire capital ? When English and American 
capitalists can run miles of barbed-wire fence, and stock 
the great inclosure with large herds of cattle, which can 
be tended, carried to market, and sold, at the minimum of 
expense and maximum of profit, what chance has the man 
who would start stock-raising with a few cows ? 

From the typical American farmer of the era now 
beginning to pass away, two types are differentiating — 
the capitalist farmer and the farm-laborer. The former 
does not work with his own hands, but with the hands of 
other men. He passes but a portion of his time, in some 
cases hardly any of it, upon the land he cultivates. His 
home is in a large town or great city, and he is, perhaps, 
a banker and speculator as well as a farmer. The latter 
is a proletarian, a nomad— part of the year a laborer and 
part of the year a tramp, migrating from farm to farm 
and from place to place, without family or home or any 
of the influences and responsibilities that develop manly 
character. If our treatment of land continues as now, 
some of our small independent farmers will tend toward 
one of these extremes, and many more wiU tend toward 
the other. But besides the tendency to production on a 
large scale, which is operating to extirpate the small inde- 
pendent farmer, there is, in the rise of land values, another 
powerful tendency operating in the same direction. 



230 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

At tlie looting of tlie Summer Palace at Pekin by the 
allied forces in 1860, some valuable jewels were obtained 
by private soldiers. How long did they remain in such 
possession? If a Duke of Brunswick were to distribute 
his hoard of diamonds among the poor, how long would 
the poor continue to hold them ? The peasants of Ireland 
and the costermongers of London have their donkeys, 
which are worth only a few shillings. But if by any 
combination of circumstances the donkey became as 
valuable as a blooded horse, no peasant or costermonger 
would be found driving a donkey. Where chickens are 
cheap, the common people eat them ; where they are dear, 
they are to be found only on the tables of the rich. So it 
is with land. As it becomes valuable it must gravitate 
from the hands of those who work for a living into the 
possession of the rich. 

"What has caused the extreme concentration of land- 
ownership in England is not so much the conversion of 
the feudal tenures into fee simple, the spoliation of the 
religious houses and the inclosure of the commons, as this 
effect of the rise in the value of land. The small estates, 
of which there were many in England two centuries and 
even a century ago,* have become parts of large estates 
mainly by purchase. They gravitated to the possession 
of the rich, just as diamonds, or valuable paintings, or 
fine horses, gravitate to the possession of the rich. 

So long as the masses are fools enough to permit private 
property in land, it is rightly esteemed the most secure 
possession. It cannot be burned, or destroyed by any 
accident ; it cannot be carried off ; it tends constantly to 
increase in value with the growth of population and 
improvement in the arts. Its possession being a visible 

* According to Macaulay, at the accession of James II., in 1685, 
the majority of English farmers were owners of the land they culti- 
vated. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 231 

sign of secure wealth, and putting its owner, as competi- 
tion becomes sharp, in the position of a lord or god to the 
human creatures who have no legal rights to this planet, 
carries with it social consideration and deference. For 
these reasons land commands a higher price in proportion 
to the income it yields than anything else, and the man 
to whom immediate income is of more importance than 
a secure investment finds it cheaper to rent land than to 
buy it. 

Thus, as land grew in value in England, the small 
owners were not merely tempted or compelled by the 
vicissitudes of life to seU their land, but it became more 
profitable to them to sell it than to hold it, as they could 
hire land cheaper than they could hire capital. By selling 
and then renting, the English farmer, thus converted from 
a landowner into a tenant, acquired, for a time at least, 
the use of more land and more capital, and the ownership 
of land thus gravitated from the hands of those whose 
prime object is to get a living into the hands of those 
whose prime object is a secure investment. 

This process must gO on in the United States as land 
rises in value. We may observe it now. It is in the newer 
parts of our growing cities that we find people of moderate 
means living in their own houses. Where land is more 
valuable, we find such people living in rented houses. In 
such cities, block after block is built and sold, generally 
under mortgage, to families who thus endeavor to secure 
a home of their own. But I think it is the general experi- 
ence, that as years pass by, and land acquires a greater 
value, these houses and lots pass from the nominal owner- 
ship of dwellers into the possession of landlords, and are 
occupied by tenants. So, in the agricultural districts, it 
is where land has increased little if anything in value 
that we find homesteads which have been long in the 
possession of the same family of working farmers. A 



232 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

general officer of one of the great trunk railroad lines told 
me that his attention had been called to the supreme 
importance of the land question by the great westward 
emigration of farmers, which, as the result of extensive 
inquiries, he found due to the rise of land values. As 
land rises in value the working farmer finds it more and 
more difficult for his boys to get farms of their own, while 
the price for which he can sell will give him a considerably 
larger tract of land where land is cheaper ; or he is tempted 
or forced to mortgage, and the mortgage eats and eats 
until it eats him out, or until he concludes that the wisest 
thing he can do is to realize the difference between the 
mortgage and the selling value of his farm and emigrate 
west. And in many cases he commences again under the 
load of a mortgage ; for as settlement is now going, very 
much of the land sold to settlers by rai'road companies 
and speculators is sold upon mortgage. And what is the 
usual result may be inferred from such announcements as 
those placarded in the union depot at Council Bluffs, 
offering thousands of improved farms for sale on liberal 
terms as to payment. One man buys upon mortgage, 
fails in his payments, or gets disgusted, and moves on, 
and the farm he has improved is sold to another man upon 
mortgage. Generally speaking, the ultimate result is, that 
the mortgagee, not the mortgageor, becomes the full owner. 
Cultivation under mortgage is, in truth, the transitional 
form between cultivation by the small owner and cultiva- 
tion by the large owner or by tenant. 

The fact is, that the typical American farmer, the cul- 
tivator of a small farm of which he is the owner, is the 
product of conditions under which labor is dear and land 
is cheap. As these conditions change, labor becoming 
cheap and land becoming dear, he must pass away as he 
has passed away in England. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 233 

It has already become impossible in our older States for 
a man starting with nothing to become by his labor the 
owner of a farm. As the public domain disappears this 
will become impossible aR over the United States. And 
as in the accidents and mutations of life the small owners 
are shaken from their holdings, or find it impossible to 
compete with the grand culture of capitalistic farming, 
they wiU not be able to recover, and must swell the mass 
of tenants and laborers. Thus the concentration of land- 
ownership is proceeding, and must proceed, if private 
property in land be continued. So far from it being to 
the interest of the working farmer to defend private 
property in land, its continued recognition means that 
his children, if not himself, shall lose all right whatever 
in their native soil ; shall sink from the condition of free- 
men to that of serfs. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

CITY AND COUNTRY. 

COBBETT compared London, even in his day, to a 
great wen growing upon the fair face of England. 
There is truth in such comparison. Nothing more clearly 
shows the unhealthiness of present social tendencies than 
the steadily increasing concentration of population in 
great cities. There are about 12,000 head of beef cattle 
killed weekly in the shambles of New York, while, exclu- 
sive of what goes through for export, there are about 2100 
beef carcasses per week brought in refrigerator-cars from 
Chicago. Consider what this single item in the food- 
supply of a great city suggests as to the elements of 
fertility, which, instead of being returned to the soil from 
which they come, are swept out through the sewers of our 
great cities. The reverse of this is the destructive char- 
acter of our agriculture, which is year by year decreasing 
the productiveness of our soil, and virtually lessening the 
area of land available for the support of our increasing 
millions. 

In all the aspects of human life similar effects are being 
produced. The vast populations of these great cities are 
utterly divorced from aU the genial influences of nature. 
The great mass of them never, from year's end to year's 
end, press foot upon mother earth, or pluck a wild flower, 
or hear the tinkle of brooks, the rustle of grain, or the 
murmur of leaves as the light breeze comes through the 



CITY AND COUNTRY. 235 

woods. All the sweet and joyous influences of nature are 
shut out from them. Her sounds are drowned by the 
roar of the streets and the clatter of the people in the next 
room, or the next tenement ; her sights are hidden from 
their eyes by rows of high buildings. Sun and moon rise 
and set, and in solemn procession the constellations move 
across the sky, but these imprisoned multitudes behold 
them only as might a man in a deep quarry. The white 
snow falls in winter only to become dirty slush on the 
pavements, and as the sun sinks in summer a worse than 
noonday heat is refracted from masses of brick and stone. 
Wisely have the authorities of Philadelphia labeled with 
its name every tree in their squares ; for how else shall the 
children growing up in such cities know one tree from 
another ? how shall they even know grass from clover ? 

This life of great cities is not the natural life of man. 
He must, under such conditions, deteriorate, physically, 
mentally, morally. Yet the evil does not end here. This 
is only one side of it. This unnatural life of the great 
cities means an equally unnatural life in the country. 
Just as the wen or tumor, drawing the wholesome juices 
of the body into its poisonous vortex, impoverishes all 
other parts of the frame, so does the crowding of human 
beings into great cities impoverish human life iu the 
country. 

Man is a gregarious animal. He cannot live by bread 
alone. If he suffers in body, mind and soul from being 
crowded into too close contact with his fellows, so also 
does he suffer from being separated too far from them. 
The beauty and the grandeur of nature pall upon man 
where other men are not to be met ; her infinite diversity 
becomes monotonous where there is not human companion- 
ship ; his physical comforts are poor and scant, his nobler 
powers languish; all that makes him higher than the 
animal suffers for want of the stimulus that comes from 



236 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

the contact of man with man. Consider the barrenness 
of the isolated farmer's life— the dull round of work and 
sleep, in which so much of it passes. Consider, what is 
still worse, the monotonous existence to which his wife is 
condemned ; its lack of recreation and excitement, and of 
gratifications of taste, and of the sense of harmony and 
beauty; its steady drag of cares and toils that make 
women worn and wrinkled when they should be in their 
bloom. Even the discomforts and evils of the crowded 
tenement-house are not worse than the discomforts and 
evils of such a life. Yet as the cities grow, unwholesomely 
crowding people together till they are packed in tiers, 
family above family, so are they unwholesomely separated 
in the country. The tendency everywhere that this pro- 
cess of urban concentration is going on, is to make the life 
of the country poor and hard, and to rob it of the social 
stimulus and social gratifications that are so necessary to 
human beings. The old healthy social life of village and 
townland is everywhere disappearing. In England, Scot- 
land and Ireland, the thinning out of population in the 
agricultural districts is as marked as is its concentration 
in cities and large towns. In Ireland, as you ride along 
the roads, your car-driver, if he be an old man, will point 
out to you spot after spot, which, when he was a boy, 
were the sites of populous hamlets, echoing in the summer 
evenings with the laughter of children and the joyous 
sports of young people, but now utterly desolate, showing, 
as the only evidences of human occupation, the isolated 
cabins of miserable herds. In Scotland, where in such 
cities as Glasgow, human beings are so crowded together 
that two-thirds of the families live in a single room, where 
if you go through the streets of a Saturday night, you 
wiU think, if you have ever seen the Tierra del Fuegans, 
that these poor creatures might envy them, there are wide 



CITY AND COUNTRY. 237 

tracts once populous, now given up to cattle, to grouse 
and to deer— glens that once sent out their thousand 
fighting men, now tenanted by a couple of gamekeepers. 
So across the Tweed, while London, Liverpool, Leeds, 
Manchester and Nottingham have grown, the village life 
of "merrie England" is all but extinct. Two-thirds of 
the entire population is crowded into cities. Clustering 
hamlets, such as those through which, according to tradi- 
tion, Shakespeare and his comrades rollicked, have disap- 
peared ; village greens where stood the May-pole, and the 
cloth-yard arrow flew from the longbow to the bull's-eye 
of the butt, are plowed under or inclosed by the walls of 
some lordly demesne, while here and there stand mementos 
alike of a bygone faith and a departed population, in great 
churches or their remains — churches such as now could 
never be filled unless the congregations were brought from 
town by railroad excursion trains. 

So in the agricultural districts of our older States the 
same tendency may be beheld; but it is in the newer 
States that its fullest expression is to be found— in ranches 
measured by square miles, where live half-savage cow- 
boys, whose social life is confined to the excitement of the 
" round-up " or a periodical " drunk " in a railroad town ; 
and in bonanza farms, where in the spring the eye wearies 
of seas of waving grain before resting on a single home 
—farms where the cultivators are lodged in barracks, and 
only the superintendent enjoys the luxury of a wife. 

That present tendencies are hurrying modern society 
toward inevitable catastrophe, is apparent from the con- 
stantly increasing concentration of population in great 
cities, if in nothing else. A century ago New York and 
its suburbs contained about 25,000 souls ; now they contain 
over 2,000,000. The same growth for another century 
would put here a population of 160,000,000. Such a city 



238 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

is impossible. But what shall we say of the cities of ten 
and twenty millions, that, if present tendencies continue, 
children now born shall see ? 

On this, however, I will not dwell. I merely wish to 
call attention to the fact that this concentration of popu- 
lation impoverishes social life at the extremities, as well 
as poisons it at the center ; that it is as injurious to the 
farmer as it is to the inhabitant of the city. 

This unnatural distribution of population, like that 
unnatural distribution of wealth which gives one man 
hundreds of millions and makes other men tramps, is the 
result of the action of the new industrial forces in social 
conditions not adapted to them. It springs primarily 
from our treatment of land as private property, and sec- 
ondarily from our neglect to assume social functions which 
material progress forces upon us. Its causes removed, 
there would ensue a natural distribution of population, 
which would give every one breathing-space and neigh- 
borhood. 

It is in this that would be the great gain of the farmer 
in the measures I have proposed. With the resumption 
of common rights to the soil, the overcrowded population 
of the cities would spread, the scattered population of the 
country would grow denser. When no individual could 
profit by advance in the value of land, when no one need 
fear that his children could be jostled out of their natural 
rights, no one would want more land than he could 
profitably use. Instead of scraggy, half-cultivated farms, 
separated by great tracts lying idle, homesteads would 
come close to each other. Emigrants would not toil 
through unused acres, nor grain be hauled for thousands 
of miles past half -tilled land. The use of machinery would 
not be abandoned : where culture on a large scale secured 
economies it would still go on ; but with the breaking up 
of monopolies, the rise in wages and the better distribution 



CITY AND COUNTEY. 239 

of wealtli, industry of this kind would assume the cooper- 
ative form. Agriculture would cease to be destructive, 
and would become more intense, obtaining more from the 
soil and returning what it borrowed. Closer settlement 
would give rise to economies of all kinds ; labor would be 
far more productive, and rural life would partake of the 
conveniences, recreations and stimulations now to be 
obtained only by the favored classes in large towns. The 
monopoly of land broken up, it seems to me that rural life 
would tend to revert to the primitive type of the village 
surrounded by cultivated fields, with its common pasturage 
and woodlands. But however this may be, the working 
farmer would participate fully in all the enormous econo- 
mies and all the immense gains which society can secure 
by the substitution of orderly cooperation for the anarchy 
of reckless, greedy scrambling. 

That the masses now festering in the tenement-houses 
of our cities, under conditions which breed disease and 
death, and vice and crime, should each family have its 
healthful home, set in its garden ; that the working farmer 
should be able to make a living with a daily average of 
two or three hours' work, which more resembled healthy 
recreation than toil ; that his home should be replete with 
aU the conveniences yet esteemed luxuries ; that it should 
be supplied with light and heat, and power if needed, and 
connected with those of his neighbors by the telephone ; 
that his family should be free to libraries, and lectures, 
and scientific apparatus, and instruction ; that they should 
be able to visit the theater, or concert, or opera, as often 
as they cared to, and occasionally to make trips to other 
parts of the country or to Europe; that, in short, not 
merely the successful man, the one in a thousand, but the 
man of ordinary parts and ordinary foresight and pru- 
dence, should enjoy all that advancing civilization can 
bring to elevate and expand human Ufe, seems, in the 



240 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

light of existing facts, as wild a dream as ever entered 
the brain of hashish-eater. Yet the powers already within 
the grasp of man make it easily possible. 

In our mad scramble to get on top of one another, how 
little do we take of the good things that bountiful nature 
offers us ! Consider this fact : To the majority of people 
in such countries as England, and even largely in the 
United States, fruit is a luxury. Yet mother earth is not 
niggard of her fruit. If we chose to have it so, every road 
might be lined with fruit-trees. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

CONCLUSION. 

HERE, it seems to me, is the gist and meaning of the 
great social problems of our time: More is given 
to us than to any people at any time before ; and, therefore, 
more is required of us. We have made, and still are 
making, enormous advances on material lines. It is 
necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. 
Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, 
a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, 
loftier, truer public spirit. Failing these, civilization must 
pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the 
ethics of savagery. For civilization knits men more and 
more closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate 
the individual to the whole, and to make more and more 
important social conditions. 

The social and political problems that confront us are 
darker than they realize who have not given thought to 
them ; yet their solution is a mere matter of the proper 
adjustment of social forces. Man masters material nature 
by studying her laws, and in conditions and powers that 
seemed most forbidding, has already found his richest 
storehouses and most powerful servants. Although we 
have but begun to systematize our knowledge of physical 
nature, it is evident she will refuse us no desire if we but 
seek its gratification in accordance with her laws. 



24:2 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

And that faculty of adapting means to ends whicli has 
enabled man to convert the once impassable ocean into 
his highway, to transport himself with a speed which 
leaves the swallow behind, to annihilate space in the com- 
munication of his thoughts, to convert the rocks into 
warmth and light and power and material for a thousand 
uses, to weigh the stars and analyze the sun, to make ice 
under the equator, and bid flowers bloom in Northern 
winters, will also, if he will use it, enable him to overcome 
social dif&eulties and avoid social dangers. The domain 
of law is not confined to physical nature. It just as cer- 
tainly embraces the mental and moral universe, and social 
growth and social hfe have their laws as fixed as those of 
matter and of motion. Would we make social life healthy 
and happy, we must discover those laws, and seek our 
ends in accordance with them. 

I ask no one who may read this book to accept my views. 
I ask him to think for himself. 

Whoever, laying aside prejudice and self-interest, will 
honestly and carefully make up his own mind as to the 
causes and the cure of the social evils that are so apparent, 
does, in that, the most important thing in his power toward 
their removal. This primary obligation devolves upon 
us individually, as citizens and as men. Whatever else 
we may be able to do, this must come first. For "if the 
blind lead the blind, they both shall fall into the ditch." 

Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting ; 
\ by complaints and denunciation ; by the formation of 
parties, or the making of revolutions ; but by the awaken- 
ing of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be 
correct thought, there cannot be right action ; and when 
there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power 
is always in the hands of the masses of men. What 
oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own 
short-sighted selfishness. 



CONCLUSION. 243 

The great work of the present for every man, and every 
organization of men, who would improve social conditions, 
is the work of education— the propagation of ideas. It 
is only as it aids this that anything else can avail. And 
in this work every one who can think may aid— first by 
forming clear ideas himself, and then by endeavoring to 
arouse the thought of those with whom he comes in 
contact. 

Many there are, too depressed, too embruted with hard 
toil and the struggle for animal existence, to think for 
themselves. Therefore the obligation devolves with all 
the more force on those who can. If thinking men are 
few, they are for that reason all the more powerful. Let 
no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he 
may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who 
thinks becomes a light and a power. That for every idle 
word men may speak they shall give an account at the 
day of judgment, seems a hard saying. But what more 
clear than that the theory of the persistence of force, 
which teaches us that every movement continues to act 
and react, must apply as well to the universe of mind as 
to that of matter ? Whoever becomes imbued with a noble 
idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and 
influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they 
few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, 
may extend, it is not given to him here to see. But it 
may be that the Lord of the Vineyard will know. 

As I said in the first of these chapters, the progress of 
civilization necessitates the giving of greater and greater 
attention and intelligence to public affairs. And for this 
reason I am convinced that we make a great mistake in 
depriving one sex of voice in public matters, and that we 
could in no way so increase the attention, the intelligence 
and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of 
social problems as by enfranchising our women. Even 



244 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

if in a ruder state of society the intelligence of one sex 
suffices for the management of common interests, the 
vastly more intricate, more delicate and more important 
questions which the progress of civilization makes of public 
moment, require the intelligence of women as of men, and 
that we never can obtain until we interest them in public 
affairs. And I have come to believe that very much of 
the inattention, the flippancy, the want of conscience, 
which we see manifested in regard to public matters of 
the greatest moment, arises from the fact that we debar 
our women from taking their proper part in these matters. 
Nothing will fully interest men unless it also interests 
women. There are those who say that women are less 
intelligent than men ; but who will say that they are less 
influential ? 

And I am firmly convinced, as I have already said, that 
to effect any great social improvement, it is sympathy 
rather than self-interest, the sense of duty rather than 
the desire for self -advancement, that must be appealed to. 
Envy is akin to admiration, and it is the admiration that 
the rich and powerful excite which secures the perpetua- 
tion of aristocracies. Where tenpenny Jack looks with 
contempt upon ninepenny Joe, the social injustice which 
makes the masses of the people hewers of wood and 
drawers of water for a privileged few, has the strongest 
bulwarks. It is told of a certain Florentine agitator that 
when he had received a new pair of boots, he concluded 
that all popular grievances were satisfi.ed. How often do 
we see this story illustrated anew in working-men's move- 
ments and trade-union struggles ? This is the weakness 
of all movements that appeal only to self-interest. 

And as man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible 
for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness 
of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things 
that individuals and classes can obtain their own just 



CONCLUSION. 245 

rights only by struggling for the rights of others. To 
illustrate : When workmen in any trade form a trades- 
union, they gain, by subordinating the individual interests 
of each to the common interests of all, the power of making 
better terms with employers. But this power goes only 
a little way when the combination of the trades-union is 
met and checked by the pressure for employment of those 
outside its limits. No combination of workmen can raise 
their own wages much above the level of ordinary wages. 
The attempt to do so is like the attempt to bail out a boat 
without stopping up the seams. For this reason, it is 
necessary, if workmen would accomplish anything real 
and permanent for themselves, not merely that each trade 
should seek the common interests of all trades, but that 
skilled workmen should address themselves to those 
general measures which will improve the condition of 
unskilled workmen. Those who are most to be consid- 
ered, those for whose help the struggle must be made, if 
labor is to be enfranchised, and social justice won, are 
those least able to help or struggle for themselves, those 
who have no advantage of property or skill or intelligence, 
— tlie men and women who are at the very bottom of the 
social scale. In securing the equal rights of these we shall 
secure the equal rights of aU. 

Hence it is, as Mazzini said, that it is around the stan- 
dard of duty rather than around the standard of self- 
interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. 
And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who 
bade men love their neighbors as themselves. 

In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve 
social problems and carry civilization onward. 



APPENDICES. 



I. 

THE UNITED STATES CENSUS REPORT ON 
THE SIZE OF FARMS. 

THE reference on page 41 to the evident incorrectness 
of the statement of the Census Report as to the 
decrease in the average size of farms in the United States, 
led, when originally published in Frank Leslie! s Illustrated 
Newspaper, to the following controversy, which is given 
as there printed : 

SUPERINTENDENT WALKER'S EXPLANATION. 

Boston, May 10, 1883. 
To the Editor of Frank Leslie^ s Illustrated Newspaper. 

Sir : In Mr. Henry George's fifth paper on the " Prob- 
lems of the Time " he declares that the statement of the 
Census Bureau to the effect that the average size of farms 
is decreasing in the United States, is inconsistent not only 
with " facts obvious aU over the United States," but with 
'^ the returns furnished by the Census Bureau itself ;" and 
at a later point, after citing the Census Statistics of the 
number of farms of certain classes, as to size, in 1870, and 
again in 1880, he says : " How, in the face of these figures, 
the Census Bureau can report a decline in the average size 



248 APPENDICES. 

of farms in tlie United States from 153 acres in 1870 to 
134 acres in 1880, I cannot understand." 

Perhaps I can offer an explanation wliich may assist 
Mr. George toward an understanding of what seems to 
him incomprehensible. 

The average size of farms in 1870 having been 153 acres, 
any increase during the intervening decade in the number 
of farms below this limit would tend to lower the average 
size of farms in 1880 ; any increase in the number of farms 
above that limit would tend to raise the average for 1880. 

Now, in fact, there has been a greater increase, on the 
whole, in the number of farms below 153 acres than in 
the number above 153 acres, and, consequently, the aver- 
age size has been reduced. 

If I have not made the reason of the case plain, I shaU 
be happy to resort to a more elementary statement, illus- 
trated with diagrams, if desired. 

Respectfully yours, 

Francis A. Walker. 



THE CENSUS REPORT AND SUPERINTENDENT WALKER'S 
EXPLANATION. 

IFrom Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 9, 1883.'] 

I must ask the patience of the readers of these articles 
if in this I make a digression, having reference to the 
letter from General Francis A. Walker, Superintendent 
of the Ninth and Tenth Censuses, which appeared in the 
last issue of this journal. 

To my comprehension. General Walker has " not made 
the reason of the case plain," nor has he explained the 
discrepancies I pointed out. I shall behappy to have his 
more elementary statement, and, if he will be so kind, to 
have it illustrated with diagrams. But, in the meantime, 



APPENDICES. 249 

as his reassertion of the statement of the Census Report 
carries the weight of of&cial authority and professional 
reputation, I propose in this paper to show in more detail 
my reasons for disputing its accuracy. 

It is specifically asserted in the reports of the Tenth 
Census that the average size of farms in the United States 
decreased during the decade ending in 1880 from 153 acres 
to 134 acres, and this assertion has been quoted all over 
the country as a conclusive reason why the people of the 
United States should not trouble themselves about the 
reckless manner in which what is now left of their once 
great public domain is being disposed of, and the rapid 
rate at which it is passing in enormous tracts into the 
private estates of non-resident speculators, English lords 
and foreign syndicates. All over the country the press 
has pointed to this declaration of the Census Bureau as 
conclusive proof, which no one could question (and which, 
up to the publication of the fifth paper of this series, no 
one seems to have thought of questioning), that these 
things need excite no uneasiness, since the steady ten- 
dency is to the sub-division of large landholdings. The 
inference would not be valid even if the alleged fact were 
true. But that I wiU not now discuss. I dispute the fact. 

General Walker states that, during the last decade, 
''there has been a greater increase, on the whole, in the 
number of farms below 153 acres than in the number 
above 153 acres." This I shall show from General Walk- 
er's own official report is not true— is, in fact, the very 
reverse of the truth. But such a misstatement of fact, 
astonishing as it is, is not so astonishing as the misstate- 
ment of principle which precedes and follows it— viz., to 
quote the remainder of the sentence, "and, consequently, 
the average size has been reduced." 

I have occasionally met thoughtless people who talked 
of discounts of 150 and 200 per cent. ; I once knew a man 



250 APPENDICES. 

who insisted that another man was twice as old as he was, 
because on a certain birthday, years before, he had been 
twice as old ; but I never yet met anybody, except very 
little childi"en, to whom all coins were pennies, who would 
say that when a shopkeeper received one piece of money 
and handed out two pieces, he had consequently reduced 
the amount of money in his di'awer ! Yet this is just such 
a statement as that made by General Walker. In asserting 
that the general increase in the number of farms under a 
certain size than in the number above that size must reduce 
the average size, General Walker ignores area, just as any 
one who would say that an amount of money had been 
reduced by adding one coin and taking away two would 
ignore value. Take, for instance, a farm of 100 acres. 
Add to it two farms of 50 acres each and one farm of 400 
acres. Here there has been a greater increase in the 
number of farms below 100 acres than the number above 
100 acres, but so far from the average having consequently 
been reduced, it has been increased from 100 to 150 acres ! 
The truth is, of course, that number is only one of the 
factors of average, which is in itself an expression of 
proportion between number and some other property of 
things, such as size, weight, length, value, etc. An average 
does not, as General Walker says, increase or diminish 
according to the numerical preponderance, on one side or 
the other, of the items added, but according to the pre- 
ponderance in number and quality. Thus, though the 
addition of any farm of less than 153 acres would tend to 
reduce an average of 153 acres, the addition of one farm 
of three acres would tend much more strongly to reduce 
the average than the addition of one of 152 acres, and the 
addition of one farm of 1000 acres would do much more 
to increase the average than the addition of several farms 
of 151 acres. Just as weights upon the arms of a lever 
tend more strongly to counterbalance each other the 



AfPENBiCES. 251 

furtlier they are placed from the fulcrum, so increase in 
the number of farms will tend more strongly to raise or 
reduce the average the further in point of area the new 
farms are from the previous average. And it may be 
worth while to remark that while the possibihties on the 
side of decrease are limited, the possibilities on the side of 
increase are unlimited. A farm less than 153 acres can 
only be less by something within 153 acres ; but a farm 
greater than 153 acres may be greater by 10,000 or 
100,000, or any larger number of acres. 

I speak of this simple and obvious principle not merely 
to show the curious confusion of thought which General 
Walker exhibits, but for the purpose of pointing out the 
significance of the facts I have previously cited— a signifi- 
cance which General "Walker does not appear, even yet, to 
reahze. 

Let me refer those who may wish to verify the accuracy 
of the figures I am about to quote to Table LXIII., 
pp. 650-657, Compendium of the Tenth Census, Parti. This 
table gives the total number of farms for 1880, 1870, 1860 
and 1850, the number of farms in eight specified classes 
for 1880, 1870 and 1860 ; the farm acreage and the aver- 
age size of farms for four censuses. We are told in a 
note that " it will be noticed " that the number of farms 
given in the specified classes for 1860 fail to agree with 
the total number given, and that ''these discrepancies 
appear without explanation in the Census of 1860." This 
is well calculated to impress one who casually turns over 
the pages of the Compendium with the vigilant care that 
has been exercised, but it becomes rather amusing when 
read in the light of the far more striking discrepancies 
which appear without explanation in the Census of 1880. 

What first struck me in glancing over this table, and 
what is so obvious that I cannot understand how, from 
Census Superintendent to lowest clerk, any one could have 



252 APPENDICES. 

transcribed, or even glanced over— not to say examined 
—these figures without being struck by it, is that in the 
face of the fact that we are told that between 1870 and 
1880 the average size of farms has been reduced, the same 
table shows in its very first lines that the great increase 
in the number of farms between 1870 and 1880 has all 
been in the four classes of largest areas, and that the 
larger the area the greater the increase ; while the number 
of farms in the four classes of smaller area have actually 
diminished, and the smaller the class area the greater the 
diminution ! To recur to our simile, it is not only that 
more weights have been placed on one end of the lever, 
but they have been pushed out further from the center. 
On the other arm the weights have not only been dimin- 
ished, but they have been drawn in closer to the center. 
Yet we are told that the lever has tipped toward the end 
that has been lightened ! 

This is the fact to which I called attention in the fifth 
paper of this series as showing the inaccuracy of the 
assertion that the average size of farms had decreased in 
the United States during the last decade. So conclusive 
is it, and so obvious is it, that I am forced to suppose that 
the Superintendent of the Tenth Census has never even 
glanced over the totals of his own report. For, although 
the number of farms in 1880 and 1870 are merely placed 
in parallel columns in the Census Report, without sub- 
traction, yet such differences as 4352 farms under three 
acres in 1880, and 6875 in 1870, and of 28,578 farms over 
1000 acres in 1880 against 3720 in 1870, are glaring enough 
to strike the eye of any one who has been told that the 
average size of farms has diminished, and to put him upon 
inquiry. 

In order to show the striking results of a comparison 
of the number of farms in the eight specified classes, in 
1880 and 1870, as reported by the Census Bureau, I have 



APPENDICES. 253 

taken the trouble to do what the Census Bureau has not 
done, and figure out the differences. 

Changes during Decade ending 1880 in the Number op Farms 
IN THE Eight Specified Classes, as Reported by Census 
Bureau. 

Class. ■'^number!^ Ratio of decrease. 

I.— Under 3 acres 2,523 37 per cent. 

II.— 3 to 10 " 37,132 21 " " 

III.— 10 to 20 " 39,858 14 " " 

IV.-20to50 " 66,140 8 " " 

'nuXT Ratio of increase. 

v.— 50 to 100 acres 278,689 37 per cent. 

VI. -100 to 500 " 1,130,929 200 " " 

VII. -500 to 1,000 " 60,099 379 '' " 

Vni.-Over 1,000 " 24,858 668 " " 

This steady progression from a decrease of 37 per cent, 
in farms under three acres up to an increase of 668 per 
cent, in farms over 1000 acres is conclusive proof that the 
average size of farms could not have decreased from 153 
to 134 acres. And the figures of numerical decrease and 
increase are at the same time a disproof of General Walker 
upon the ground he has chosen. " Now, in fact," he says, 
" there has been a greater increase, on the whole, in the 
number of farms below 153 acres than in the number 
above 153 acres, and, consequently, the average size ifias 
been reduced." './m, f" 

The pivotal point, of 153 acres, falls in Class VI., which 
includes farms between 100 anil 500 acres. There is no 
way of deciding with certainty how many of these farms 
are between 100 and 153 acres, and how many between 
153 and 500 acres; but inasmuch as, in the absence of 
special reasons to the contrary, there can be no doubt that 
the average of the class must largely exceed 153 acres 
(which is very much nearer the class minimum than the 



254 APPENDICES. 

class maximum), and therefore that, taken as a whole, 
the entire class must count on the side of increase, we 
should reach substantial accuracy in setting down the 
whole increase in this class as over 153 acres. This would 
give : 

Increase in number of farms above 153 acres 1,215,886 

Net increase in farms below 153 acres 133,036 

Excess in increase of number of farms above 153 acres . 1, 082, 850 

This would be substantially accurate ; but if a greater 
formal exactness is required, let us try to decide, as best 
we may, what part of the farms of between 100 and 500 
acres should be counted as under 153 acres. 

Whoever knows anything of the United States land 
system, and the parceling of land in our newer States and 
Territories where the greater part of this increase in the 
number of farms has taken place, knows that the farms 
between 100 and 160 acres must be comparatively few. 
The reason of this is, that the government surveys divide 
the land into sections and fractions of a section, the 
practical unit being the quarter-section of 160 acres, which 
is the amount open to preemption and homestead entry. 
The land-grant railroad companies sell their land in the 
same way by the government surveys ; and, in fact, nearly 
all the transfers of farms in our new States, long after the 
land has passed into private hands, is by fractions of a 
section, the quarter-section of 160 acres being almost uni- 
versally regarded as the unit. "When the quarter-section 
is divided, it is generally div'ded into the eighth, or as it 
is commonly called, the half quarter section, which falls 
into the class below the one we are considering. There 
can be no doubt whatever that the great majority of the 
newer farms of the class between 100 and 500 acres con- 
sist of quarter-sections, two-quarter sections, and three- 
quarter sections. Considering aU this, it is certain that 



APPENDICES. 255 

we shall be making a most liberal allowance for the farms 
between 100 and 153 acres if we estimate the farms above 
153 acres at 1,000,000 and those below at the odd number 
of 130,929. This would give : 

Increase in farms above 153 acres 1,084,957 

Net increase in farms below 153 acres 263,965 

Excess in increase of farms above 153 acres. . . 820,992 

I have disposed of General Walker's principle and of 
his fact, and have sustained my own allegation of the 
inaccuracy of the Census Report. I will now go further, 
and prove in another way the glaring discrepancies of 
the Census Report, and the grossness of the assumption 
that it shows a reduction in the average size of farms. 
Subtracting the totals given for 1870 from those given 
for 1880, we find the increase in acreage and number of 
farms as follows : 

"^"off™"" Total acreage. 

1880 4,008,907 536,081,835 

1870 2,659,985 407,735,041 

Increase in decade 1,348,922 128,3i6,794 



The average size of farms in 1880, given at 134 acres, 
has been obtained by dividing the total acreage by the 
given total number of farms. The division is correct, but 
examination shows that there is an error either in the divi- 
dend or in the divisor, which makes the quotient less than 
it ought to be. Either the number of farms is too high, 
or the acreage too low. Let me prove this beyond 
question. 

The net increase in the number of farms in the eight 
specified classes, as I have given it, corresponds with the 
total increase obtained by subtracting from the total 



256 APPENDICES. 

number of farms given for 1880 tlie total given for 1870. 
But no estimate can make the increase in area correspond. 

To show that it is impossible on any supposition to 
make the increased acreage of the specified classes as low 
as the increased acreage according to the census totals, 
we will, where there has been decrease in the number of 
farms, consider these farms to have been of the very 
largest size embraced in the class. Where the number 
of farms has increased we will consider these farms as 
having been of the very smallest size embraced in the 
class. 

Thus we have— 

Class. Decrease. 

I. —Under 3 acres, 2, 523, at 3 acres 7, 569 

II.— StolO " 37,132,atl0 " 371,320 

III.— 10 to 20 " 39,858, at 20 " 797,1^0 

IV.— 20 to 50 " 66,140, at 50 " 3,307,000 

Total decrease in area 4,483,049 

Class. Increase. 

v.— 50 to 100 acres, 278,689, at 50 acres, 13,934,450 

VI.— 100 to 500 '' 1,130,929, at 100 " 113,092,900 

VII.-500 to 1,000 " 60,099, at 500 " 30,049,500 

VIIL— Over 1,000 " 24,858, at 1,000 " 24,858,000 

Total increase in area 181,934,850 

Subtract decrease 4,483,049 

Net increase in farm acreage 177,451,801 

Thus this lowest possible estimate of increased farm 
area exceeds the increase of 128,346,794, according to the 
census totals, by no less than 49,105,007 acres. According 
to the census totals the average area of the 1,348,922 new 
farms was only 95.1 acres. According to this lowest 
possible estimate of the areas assigned to these new farms 
in the table of specified classes, the average is 131.6. And 
adding this very lowest possible estimate of increased 



APPENDICES. 



267 



average to that given for 1870, the total farm acreage of 

the United States in 1880 was 585,186,842 acres, instead 
of 536,081,835 acres, as represented by the Census Bureau, 
giving an average of 145.9 acres, instead of 134 acres, as 
reported. 

Of course, such an estimate is preposterous, but it 
shows indisputably the glaring incorrectness of the Census 
Report. 

To obtain from the table of specified classes an estimate 
of the true increase of farm acreage in the United States 
during the last decade, our only way is to ascertain from 
the census of 1870, also made under General Walker's 
superintendence, the average of class areas which would 
give the total for that year, and take them for our calcu- 
lation. 

To make the acreage of the specified classes for 1870 
agree with the total acreage given, we must make some 
such estimate as the following : 

ACREAGE BY SPECIFIED CLASSES FOR 1870. 



Glass. 






Average 


Number of 


Total 








acreage. 


farms. 


acres. 


I. —Under 


3 


acres . 


2i 


6,875 


17,187 


n.— 3 to 


10 




8f 


172,020 


1,505,183 


III.— 10 to 


20 




18 


294,607 


5,302,926 


IV.- 20 to 


50 




44 


847,614 


37,295,016 


v.- 50 to 


100 




90 


754,221 


67,879,890 


VI.— 100 to 


500 




400 


565,054 


226,021,600 


VII. -500 to 


1,000 




900 


15,873 


14,285,700 


VIII.— Over 


1,000 




. 14,900 


3,720 


55,428,000 


Totals . 


2,659,985 


407,735,502 



This is about as close as I can figure with any regard 
to proportion, and it comes so close to 407,735,041, the 
acreage given for 1870, that the difference would not 
perceptibly affect any average. 



258 



APPENDICES. 



Now, taking these averages of 1870 as a basis for cal- 
culating the true farm acreage in 1880, we have : 

ACREAGE BT SPECIFIED CLASSES FOR 1880. 



Class. 






Acres. 


Num'ber of 
farms. 


Acreage. 


I. — Under 


3 


acres . 


2i 


4,352 


10,880 


II.- 3 to 


10 


ii 


8f 


134,889 


1,180,278 


III.- 10 to 


20 


a 


18 


254,749 


4,585,482 


IV.- 20 to 


50 


a 


44 


781,474 


34,384,856 


v.- 50 to 


100 


(I 


. . 90 


1,032,910 


92,961,900 


VI. -100 to 


500 


a 


400 


1,695,983 


678,393,200 


Vn.— 500to 


1,000 


li 


900 


75,972 


68,374,800 


VIII.- Over 


1,000 


u 


. 14,900 


28,578 


425,812,200 


Totals . 








.4,008,907 


1,305,703,596 



This would make the average size of farms in the United 
States 325^ acres, instead of 134 acres as reported by the 
Census Bureau, an increase of 172^ acres, instead of a 
decrease of 19 acres as reported. 

I do not, of course, say that this estimate is correct. I 
can only say that it is the best that can be made from the 
Census Reports. These reports show such a lack of intel- 
ligent superintendence and editing, that I doubt their 
reliability for any purpose. The only thing absolutely 
certain is, that the conclusions of the Census Bureau are 
not correct. 

And further than the gross discrepancies I have shown, 
these returns of farms and farm areas give no idea of the 
manner in which the ownership of land is concentrating 
in the United States. It is not merely that in many cases 
the same person is the owner of separate farms, but it is 
evident from the returns that stock farms, cattle ranches, 
and the large tracts held by absentees, have not been 
included. This may be seen by the fact that the returns 
of farms of over 1000 acres number only 14 for Wyoming, 



APPENDICES. 259 

43 for New Mexico, 20 for Montana, 8 for Idaho, 74 for 
Dakota, and so on. 

I have gone into this subject at such length because the 
authority of the census has been so generally invoked as 
conclusive proof that the ownership of land is not con- 
centrating in the United States. The truth is, that it is 
concentrating so rapidly that, should present tendencies 
continue, it will not be many decades before we shall be 
a nation of landlords and tenants. 



SUPERINTENDENT WALKER'S FURTHER EXPLANATION. 

[jFVom Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 16, ISSSJ] 

To the Editor of Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper : 

Mr. George's attack upon the Census Statistics of the 
number and size of farms, in your issue of June 9th, 
affords a capital example of that writer's cleverness in 
imposing upon the careless reader. Indeed, although 
somewhat familiar with the subject-matter, I wasn't sure 
myself, until I had gone through the article more than 
once, that there might not be something in it, so porten- 
tous was the marshaling of figures, so loud and strenuous 
the assertion that the census was wrong in this and 
inconsistent in that ; so artfully were all the resources of 
controversy used to produce the impression Mr. George 
desired. And yet there is absolutely nothing in it which 
cannot be readily and completely disproved. It is, from 
beginning to end, an utter sham. 

Suppose a township of 25 square miles to have been 
divided, in 1870, into 64 farms of 250 acres each. These 
would have been reported, according to the classification 
in use at each census from 1850 to the present time, as 
farms of over 100 and under 500 acres ; aggregate land in 
farms, 16,000 acres. Now, suppose precisely the same 



260 APPENDICES. 

territory to have been divided in 1880 into farms of 125 
acres each. The official record would then read, 128 farms 
of over 100 and under 500 acres ; aggregate land in farms, 
16,000 acres. Ah, exclaims the critic, observe this mon- 
strous blunder ! Here is an increase of 64 farms in this 
class, and yet no increase whatever of acreage ! Let us, 
he continues, concede, in the extreme spirit of fairness, 
that these farms were all of the very smallest size con- 
tained in this class, vi^. : 100 acres each, we still ought to 
have, at the least, an increase of 6400 acres over the official 
return, which is thus shown on the face of it to be false. 

This is Mr, George's reasoning, precisely. To omit 
minor classes, let us take the greatest class of all, that of 
farms between 100 and 500 acres, the increase in the 
number of farms of this class being no less than 1,130,929, 
against 217,993 only of all the other classes combined. 
Mr. George assumes that these 1,130,929 farms represent 
a pure net addition to the acreage of inclosed land. Hav- 
ing made such an utterly gratuitous, utterly unfounded, 
utterly dishonest assumption, Mr. George, with that inimi- 
table show of candor which always characterizes him after 
a logical larceny of this sort, very graciously gives the 
Census Office the benefit of his concession that he wiU 
only exact 100 acres for each of these 1,130,929 farms ; 
and having proceeded to deal this way with all the other 
classes, he brings the Census Office out a debtor in the 
sum of 49,105,007 acres. Perhaps, with that same remark- 
able candor, he would consent to strike off 105,007 acres 
and call it only 49,000,000. 

Such is the wretched stuff which Mr. George imposes on 
his readers as a serious statistical argument. That the 
land of all the older States is in process of sub-division, 
every one above the grade of a plantation hand, who has 
lived three years east of the Rocky Mountains, knows per- 
fectly weU. In the main, the increase of farms in these 



APPENDICES. 261 

States is by tlie partition of land previously inclosed. 
Thus, Connecticut showed 2,364,416 acres in 25,508 farms 
in 1870, and 2,453,541 acres in 30,598 farms in 1880— 
an increase of nearly 20 per cent, in farms, and of but 
5 per cent, in acreage. New York showed 22,190,810 
acres in 216,253 farms in 1870, and 23,780,754 acres in 
241,058 farms in 1880. Georgia, to take a State from 
another section, showed 23,647,941 acres in 69,956 farms 
in 1870, and 26,043,282 acres in 138,626 farms in 1880— 
a gain of about 10 per cent, in acreage, and of almost 100 
per cent, in farms. This tremendous increase of farms in 
Georgia is due to the continuous sub-division of the old 
plantations in order to furnish small farms for the late 
slaves and the " poor whites " of that region. The same 
cause is operating, with great force, all over the South, 
and this it is which has brought about that reduction of 
the average size of farms in the United States from 153 
acres in 1870 to 134 acres in 1880, which arouses such 
prodigious wrath on the part of Mr. George, who, having 
started out on a crusade against landed property with the 
cry that the country is going to the dogs through the 
aggregation of great estates— latifundia, as he magnifi- 
cently calls it, to the confusion, there is reason to fear, of 
most of his disciples— is brought violently and injuriously 
up against hard facts, such as those just cited. The fol- 
lowing table shows the increase of the number of farms in 
the chief cotton-planting States : 

1880. 1870. 

Alabama 135,864 67,382 

Arkansas 94,433 49,424 

Georgia 138,626 69,956 

LoTiisiana 48,292 28,481 

Mississippi 101,772 68,023 

North CaroUna 157,609 93,565 

South Carolina 93,864 51,889 

Tennessee 165,650 118,141 

Texas 174. 184 61, 125 



262 APPENDICES. 

Such, then, is Mr. George's main argument against the 
census figures. "Let me," he says, ''prove this beyond 
question." We may, therefore, understand this to be Mr. 
George's idea of proving a proposition beyond question. 
And, in truth, it is very much the way he has taken to 
prove all the propositions I have read from his pen. To 
make any assumption whatever that suits his purpose, 
to reason therefrom most logically and felicitously, and to 
apply thereto, when required, arithmetical computations 
of the most minute accuracy, is tlie favorite method of 
this apostle of a new political economy and a regenerated 
humanity. 

In the case under consideration, he assumes that new 
farms always represent new lands, a most gratuitous 
assumption, contrary to the known facts of the situation, 
and then proceeds, by a faultless series of additions and 
multiplications, to bring the Census Office in as debtor in 
the amount of 49,000,000 acres lost to the nation through 
its carelessness. 

Again, Mr. George's assumption that the farms between 
100 and 500 acres must be preponderatingly above 153 
acres, inasmuch as the government sells land in 160-acre 
lots, " quarter-sections," as they are called, may be met by 
the assertion that five-sixths of the present farms of the 
United States were either not granted originally on the 
quarter-section plan (as in the Eastern States), or else 
have been long enough in private hands to allow, as 
Americans buy and sell, abundant scope for changes of 
area, in the way of partition, consolidation, etc. 

The question at issue between Mr. George and the 
Census Office really turns upon the average size of the 
farms between 100 and 500 acres. Mr. George estimates 
that average at 400 acres! The reasonableness or un- 
reasonableness of this will best be made to appear by 



APPENDICES. 263 

presenting the number of farms in the classes above 
and below : 

20 to 50 acres 781,474 

50 to 100 " 1,032,910 

100 to 500 " 1,695,983 

500 to 1,000 " 75,972 

Any one who can look at these figures and not see, at a 
glance, that the probabilities are overwhelmingly in favor 
of the supposition that the great body of the farms of the 
third class, in the above table, are nearer, much nearer, 
very much nearer, to the lower than to the upper limit, is 
to be pitied for his defective eyesight and his defective 
mind-sight. If Mr. George cannot see that, there is reason 
to fear that a diagram would not help him. Who can 
believe it possible that, while the farms of Class IV. are 
only 1 in 22 of the farms in Class III,, the farms of the 
latter class lie so close up to the limit of the fourth class 
as to average 400 acres each, or for that matter, 300 acres, 
or even 250 acres ? 

It is certainly to be regretted, since this controversy has 
arisen, that a new class, 100 to 150, or 100 to 200 acres, 
was not introduced. But the classification taken for this 
purpose is that which has always heretofore been em- 
ployed, alike in 1850, in 1860, and 1870 ; while, so far as 
I am aware, no one has ever before complained of its 
inefiSiciency or suggested to the Census Of&ce the sub- 
division of this class. 

Mr. George is undoubtedly right in his captious correc- 
tion of my phraseology in speaking of the effect produced 
by an increase in the number of farms, above or below the 
line, 153 acres, upon the average size of all farms in com- 
parison of 1870 with 1880. I think no one would have 
failed to understand me who desired to do so, and what I 



264 APPENDICES. 

had in mind was perfectly just ; yet, in a controversy with 
a gentleman so much more particular about phraseology 
than about facts, I should have done well to state my 
meaning more explicitly. 

Respectfully, 

Francis A. Walker. 
Boston, June 10, 1883. 



FURTHER ANALYSIS OP THE CENSUS REPORT. 
IFrom Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June SO, 1883. 2 

In his reply to my exhibition of the utter inconsistency 
between the census figures and census conclusions as to 
the size of farms, Professor Walker, instead of furnishing 
the diagrams with which he, in the first place, proposed 
to enlighten my ignorance, resorts to something more 
resembling diatribes. To such controversy I cannot 
descend. 

Professor Walker complains that I estimate the average 
size of farms in the class between 100 and 500 acres at 
400 acres, and devotes much space to showing that this 
estimate is too great. But this estimate is not mine. Had 
I been making a guess, without reference to the Census 
Eeport, I should certainly not have put the average of 
this class at above 250 acres. But at any such average 
it is impossible to make the aggregate acreage of the 
specified classes for 1870 correspond with the total acreage 
given. As I showed in detail, to make the acreage of 
these classes agree with the total acreage given, such 
averages as 90 acres for the class between 50 and 100 
acres, 400 acres for the class between 100 and 500, 900 
acres for the class between 500 and 1000 acres, and 14,900 
for farms over 1000 acres must be assumed. These aver- 
ages seem to me preposterous ; but I am not responsible 



APPENDICES. 265 

for them. Professor Francis A. Walker, Superintendent 
of the Tenth Census, must settle this matter with Pro- 
fessor Francis A. Walker, Superintendent of the Ninth 
Census. 

And to clench what I have already said as to the size of 
farms in Class IV., I challenge Professor Walker to give 
to the public any computation of acreage by specified 
classes by which, putting the average of Class IV. at 153 
acres, and having any regard whatever for proportion in 
the other classes, he can make the total acreage correspond 
with that given in the Census Report. 

As for Professor Walker's effort to prove that increase 
in the number of farms does not necessarily involve increase 
in total area, it would be as pertinent for him to attempt 
to prove that in changing a dollar into ten dimes one gets 
no more money, or that a big piece of cloth may be cut 
into smaU pieces without increase in the amount of cloth. 
This I have never heard denied, unless by Professor Walker 
himself, who, in his previous letter, asserted that a greater 
increase in the number of farms below than above a certain 
point necessarily showed a decrease of average area. The 
absui'dity of this— a principle which he offered to illus- 
trate with diagrams— I previously pointed out, and he now 
admits, but in a style which reminds me of a dispute I 
once heard between two colored citizens. One, who gloried 
in the title of Professor Johnson, was boasting that he 
could polish twelve dozen pairs of boots in half an hour. 
A fellow boot-black disputed this, and pressed him with a 
bet. Driven into a corner. Professor Johnson, with much 
indignation, declared that when he said twelve dozen 
pairs of boots he meant six pairs of shoes, and any " fool 
nigger" ought to know what he meant. So, Professor 
Walker, driven to admit the absurdity of his statement 
of principle, speaks of my captious correction of his 
phraseology, and declares that no one would have failed to 



266 APPENDICES. 

understand him who desired to do so. This is a rather 
unbecoming descent from the altitude of an offer of dia- 
grams ! A frank admission that he had been betrayed by 
carelessness would have inspired more respect. 

But it is to be feared that such carelessness is a habit 
with Professor Walker. This letter shows as curious con- 
fusion of thought as his first, and, with seemingly utter 
unconsciousness of the fallacy, he essays, with what the 
logicians call an ignoratio elenchi, to break the force of my 
marshaling of census figures. To prove the absolute 
inconsistency of the census, I showed that the lowest 
possible estimate of increased acreage by specified classes 
gives an aggregate acreage of 49,105,107 acres in excess 
of the census total. To this conclusive proof of gross 
inaccuracy Professor Walker replies by supposing a 
township of twenty-five square miles. [It may be worth 
while to remark that a United States township is thirty- 
six, not twenty-five, square miles.] He supposes this 
township to have been divided in 1870 into 64 farms of 
250 acres each, which would be returned by the census in 
the class between 100 and 500 acres. In 1880 the same 
township is divided into 128 farms of 125 acres each. But 
the acreage of 64 additional farms at the lowest class limit 
of 100 acres, added to the previous total acreage, would 
give 6400 more acres than the township contains ; which 
proves, according to Professor Walker, that, in assuming 
that the net increase of acreage of specified classes must 
represent an addition to that acreage, I have made " an 
utterly gratuitous, utterly unfounded, utterly dishonest 
assumption." 

In fact, however, Professor Walker's unfortunate ex. 
ample proves nothing in point, unless it be the truth o^ 
the old rhyme : 

If ifs and ans were pots and pans, 
There'd be few blundering tinkers. 



APPENDICES. 267 

What Professor "Walker omits in his example— as, of 
course, he will see when his attention is called to it— is 
the essence of the matter, the division into classes. By- 
supposing the farms in his township to be all within one 
class, Professor Walker ignores this essential element. 
The case he presents is not analogous to the case pre- 
sented by the census, but analogous to the case which 
would be presented by the census were no returns by 
classes given. If the census report merely gave us the 
total acreage and total number of farms, we could go no 
further in verifying what it told us as to increase or 
decrease of average than by testing the division. But 
the census gives us more than this. Besides total acreage 
and total number, it gives us the number of farms in 
eight specified classes as to area. 

To make Professor Walker's supposed township analo- 
gous to the case in point, we must suppose its farms to 
vary in size from under three acres to over 1000 acres, 
and that we are given for each decade, not merely the 
total number of farms and total area, but also the number 
in eight classes of specified areas. This given, in case the 
average size of the farms in the township had decreased 
from 250 acres to 125 acres, should we not expect the class 
returns to show an increase in the number of farms in the 
classes of smaller acreage, and a decrease in the classes of 
larger acreage ? And if they were to show just the reverse 
of this— a decrease in the number of smaller farms and 
an increase in the number of larger farms — should we not 
say that they were inconsistent with the reduction of 
average? This inconsistency is just what the Census 
Report shows. 

Professor Walker asserts that I have made a gratuitous 
assumption, contrary to the known facts of the case, in 
assuming that additional farms represent additional land. 
If he will show me, with or without diagrams, any other 



268 APPENDICES. 

basis of computation, I shall be obliged to him. I do not 
know what arithmetic they may use in the Boston Tech- 
nical School, but I will take an example after the manner 
of the old arithmetics : 

"A boy's trousers contain two yards of cloth; his 
father's, three yards. Last year they had each two pairs 
of trousers ; this year they have each three pairs. How 
much more cloth have they in their trousers this year 
than last?" 

Any one— outside, perhaps, the Census Bureau or Tech- 
nical School of Boston— would say : " One more pair of 
trousers for the boy, two yards ; one more for the father, 
three yards. Answer— five yards." 

Supposing somebody should reply: "You have made 
in your calculation an utterly gratuitous, utterly un- 
founded, utterly dishonest assumption, contrary to all 
the known facts of the case. You have assumed the boy's 
new trousers to have been made from new cloth, whereas 
they were cut down from his father's old ones ! " 

Any little child would smile, and answer : " That makes 
no difference. Whether the father's trousers have been 
cut down for the boy, or the boy's trousers have been 
pieced out for the father, the boy has one more pair of 
trousers with two yards in them, and the father one more 
pair of trousers with three yards in them, and together 
they have five yards more cloth in their trousers." 

And so, though it is true that in many cases farms 
of one class are formed from previously existing farms of 
another class, the only method of computing increase of 
area is by taking the increased number at the given area. 
An acre of land may form part of a farm of one class at 
one time, and of a farm of another class at another time. 
But we cannot suppose it to be in two farms at the same 
time. 

"Without meeting the facts and figures which I gave 
from the Census Report in disproof of the assertion that 



APPENDICES. 269 

the average size of farms had been reduced in the last 
decade, Professor Walker reiterates that assertion. He 
says: 

" That the land of all the older States is in process of 
sub-division, every one above the grade of a plantation 
hand, who has lived three years east of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, knows perfectly well. In the main, the increase of 
farms in these States is by the partition of land previously 
inclosed. Thus, Connecticut showed 2,364,416 acres in 
25,508 farms in 1870, and 2,453,541 acres in 30,598 farms 
in 1880— an increase of nearly 20 per cent, in farms, and 
of but 5 per cent, in acreage. New York showed 22,190,- 
810 acres in 216,253 farms in 1870, and 23,780,754 acres 
in 241,058 farms in 1880. Georgia, to take a State from 
another section, showed 23,647,941 acres in 69,956 farms' 
in 1870, and 26,043,282 acres in 138,626 farms in 1880— 
a gain of about 10 per cent, in acreage, and of almost 100 
per cent, in farms. This tremendous increase of farms in 
Georgia is due to the continuous sub-division of the old 
plantations in order to furnish small farms for the late 
slaves and the 'poor whites' of that region. The same 
cause is operating, with great force, aU over the South, 
and this it is which has brought about that reduction of 
the average size of farms in the United States from 153 
acres in 1870 to 134 acres in 1880, which arouses such 
prodigious wrath on the part of Mr. George." 

It is a very pleasant theory that the old plantations in 
the South are being sub-divided in order to furnish small 
farms for the late slaves and the "poor whites," and it 
would be still pleasanter if it involved any presumption 
that they were getting these small farms as owners and 
not as rack-rented tenants. But, unfortunately, while it 
is not borne out by any information from the South that 
I have been able to get, it is absolutely disproved by the 
census returns. Professor Walker parades, as though it 
trere proof of this sub-division of plantations, a table giving 



270 APPENDICES. 

the total number of farms in nine cotton-growing- States 
in 1870 and 1880, which shows a large increase in the 
number of farms ; but he very prudently neglects to specify 
the classes in which this increase took place. He could 
not have done this without showing to the eye of the 
reader that, instead of a continuous sub-division of the 
old plantations, the general tendency in those States is to 
an increase in the size of farms. Whoever will glance 
over the census returns by specified classes wiU see that, 
whereas there was in the decade ending 1870 a striking 
decrease in the number of large farms, and a striking 
increase in the number of small farms, yet in the decade 
ending 1880 the striking increase is in the large farms, 
and the striking decrease in the small farms. If old 
plantations are being cut up, then new plantations in 
greater number are being formed ; for in all these States 
the most striking increase is in the larger classes. The 
farms having 500 and 1000 acres, and over 1000 acres, 
are in all these States much more numerous in 1880 than 
in 1870, and even much more numerous than in 1860. 

The following table, drawn from the census reports, 
shows the number of farms of each class in the nine States 
referred to by Professor Walker— viz., Alabama, Arkansas, 
Greorgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South 
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas— for the last three censuses : 

NUMBER OF FARMS IN COTTON STATES BY CLASSES. 



Class. 






I860. 


1870. 


1880. 


I. 


—Under 


3 acres No returns 


2,053 


1,308 


n. 


- 3 to 


10 ' 


11,248 


47,088 


36,644 


m. 


- 10 to 


20 ' 


37,494 


101,272 


111,111 


IV. 


- 20 to 


50 ' 


123,977 


223,444 


277,112 


V. 


- 50 to 


100 ' 


101,576 


124,852 


229,006 


VI. 


-100 to 


500 ' 


112,193 


91,370 


410,066 


vn. 


-500 to 


1,000 ' 


11,976 


6,407 


37,843 


vm. 


— Over 


1,000 ' 


3,557 


1,500 


17,394 



APPENDICES. 



271 



These figures show that the movement in these nine 
Southern States was in the last decade the reverse of the 
movement in the previous decade, and was to the increase, 
not to the decrease, in the size of farms. This will be 
even more strikingly shown to the eye of the reader by 
the following table, which exhibits the percentage of 
increase or decrease in each class for the decade ending 
1870 and the decade ending 1880 : 



PERCENTAGE OF CHANGE IN NUMBER OP FARMS IN COTTON STATES. 



I. — Under 

n.- 3 to 

in.- 10 to 

rV.- 20 to 

v.— 50 to 

VI.— 100 to 



3 acres 
10 " 
20 " 
50 " 

100 " 

500 " 



Vn.— 500to 1,000 
VIII.— Over 1,000 



1870. 
Per cent. 

No returns for 1860 

319 increase 

170 " 

80 " 

23 " 

19 decrease 



47 
58 



1880. 
Per cent. 

31 decrease 
22 " 
10 increase 
24 
77 
349 



491 
1,060 



In the face of this exhibit, what could be more prepos- 
terously false than the census declaration, reiterated by 
Superintendent Walker, that the average size of farms in 
these States decreased in the last decade, and decreased 
almost as much as in the previous decade!— viz., 32 per 
cent, in the decade ending 1880, and 42 per cent, in the 
decade ending 1870 ! 

It is a work of supererogation to show in further detail 
the utter incompatibility of census figures with census 
conclusions; but inasmuch as Professor Walker calls 
attention to the three States of Connecticut, New York, 
and Georgia, let us follow him on the ground he has 
selected, and look briefly at the returns for these States. 
We shall see that they too utterly disprove the census 
conclusions. 



•272 APPENDICES. 

For Connecticut the census totals give : 



Total 
acreage. 

1870-2,364,416 

1880-2,453,541 

Increase .. . 89,125 



CONNECTICUT. 



Num'ber of 
farms. 



25,508 
30,598 

5,090 



Average size 
of farms. 

93 acres 

80 " 

13 acres decrease 



Now let us see how this averred reduction in average 
size of farms from 93 to 80 acres is borne out by the 
returns of increase by classes. These show : 

CHANGE IN NUMBER OF FARMS IN CONNECTICUT, 
DECADE ENDING 1880. 



Class. 






Change in num'ber. 


Change 


per cent. 


I. 


-Under 


3 acres 37 decrease 


52 decrease 


n. 


— 3to 


10 ' 


545 increase 


32 increase 


ni. 


- 10 to 


20 ' 


310 " 


10 


11 


IV. 


- 20 to 


50 " 


145 decrease 


2 decrease 


V. 


- 50 to 


100 ' 


' 569 increase 


8 increase 


VI. 


-100 to 


500 ' 


3,725 " 


64 


ee 


VII. 


—500 to 1,000 ' 


107 " 


412 


(( 


vni. 


- Over 1,000 ' 


16 " 


1,600 


11 




Net increase in 


"arms under 100 acres . . 




.1,242 




Increase 


in farm 


s over 100 acres 




.3,848 



Could anything more conclusively disprove the assertion 
of reduced average ? 

Take now New York. The census totals give : 



Total 
acreage. 

1870-22,190,810 

1880-23,780,754 



Increase.. 1,589,944 



NEW TORK. 

Numher of 
Farms. 

216,253 

241,058 

24,805 



Average size of 
farms. 

103 acres 

99 " 

4 acres decrease 



APPENDICES. 



2*73 



Turning to the tables of specified classes, we find the 
increase has been : 



CHANGE IN NUMBER OP FARMS IN NEW YORK, 
DECADE ENDING 1880. 



Class. 

I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 

VII. 

vni. 



—Under 

- 3to 

- 10 to 

- 20 to 

- 50 to 
—100 to 
—500 to 1,000 

- Over 1,000 



3 acres 
10 " 



20 

50 

100 

500 



Change in niunber. 
298 increase 
1,537 " 
916 decrease 
14,495 " 
3,295 " 
49,325 increase 
1,106 " 
245 " 



Net decrease in farms under 100 acres 
Increase in farms over 100 acres 



Change per cent. 
414 increase 
12 " 
6 decrease 
26 " 
4 " 
72 increase 
542 " 
681 " 

16,871 

41,676 



In the face of these figures, will Professor "Walker assert 
that the average size of farms in New York has decreased 
from 103 acres to 99 acres ? 

Now, let us take the case of Georgia, in which Professor 
Walker dwells, as the typical Southern State. 

The census totals give : 



Total 
acreage. 

1870-23,647,941 

1880—26,043,282 

Increase.. 2,395,341 



GEORGIA. 

Number of 
farms. 

69,956 

138,626 

68,670 



Average size 
of farms. 

338 acres 

188 " 

150 acres decrease 



From the table of specified classes we find the increase 
to have been : 



CHANGE IN NUMBER OP FARMS IN GEORGIA, 
DECADE ENDING 1880. 

Class. Change in number. Change per cent. 

I.— Under 3 acres No return for 1870 

II.— 3 to 10 " 147 decrease 4 decrease 

III.— 10 to 20 " 1,752 increase 25 increase 



74 




APPENDICES. 






Class. 




Change in number. 


Change 


per cent. 


IV. 


- 20 to 50 


acres. . .14,553 increase 


66 increase 


V. 


- 50 to 100 


" ... 7,683 " 


41 


u 


VI. 


—100 to 500 


" ...56,145 " 


206 


t( 


VII. 


-500 to 1,000 


" ... 5,511 " 


365 


It 


VIII. 


— Over 1,000 


" ... 3,702 " 


733 


tt 



After verifying these figures, will Professor Walker 
again assert, on the authority of the census, that during 
the last decade there has been a gain of about 10 per cent, 
in acreage, and almost 100 per cent, in farms in Georgia, 
and that the average size of farms has been reduced from 
338 acres to 188 acres ? 

It is, of course, manifest in the case of Georgia as in 
the cases of Connecticut and New York, and of the United 
States at large, that the real movement has been in the 
other direction — to the large increase instead of to the 
reduction of the average of farms. If we endeavor, from 
the data which the census gives us, to work out some 
approximation to the true average, our first step will be 
to ascertain what averages in the various classes reported 
for 1870 will give the total acreage for that year. The 
moment we attempt this we run against an astounding 
fact. The figures I am about to give I expressly com- 
mend to Superintendent Walker, but I request him to 
remember that it is he, not I, who is responsible for them. 
What has he to say to the fact that, in order to make 
the acreage of the farms returned for Georgia by specified 
classes for 1870 correspond with the total acreage given 
for that year on which his calculation of average has been 
based, it is necessary to assume the very highest limit of each 
class as the average of that class, and even then to assume the 
average of the class over 1000 acres to be 24,558 acres f 

Here is the tabulation : 

FARM ACREAGE OP GEORGIA, 1870. 

Total farm acreage of Georgia for 1870, as given 

by the Census Eeport 23,647,941 

Total number of farms 69,956 



APPENDICES. 



275 



ACREAGE BY SPECIFIED CLASSES. 



Class. 






Average 
acreage. 


Number 
of farms. 


Acres. 


II. 


- 3to 


10 acres . 


10 


3,257 


32,570 


in. 


- 10 to 


20 " . 


20 


6,942 


138,840 


rv. 


- 20 to 


50 " . 


50 


21,971 


1,098,550 


V. 


- 50 to 


100 " . 


100 


18,371 


1,837,100 


VI. 


-100 to 


500 " . 


500 


17,490 


8,745,000 


vn.- 


-500 to 1,000 " . 


... 1,000 


1,506 


1,506,000 


VIII.- 


— Over 


1,000 " . 


... 24,558 


419 


10,289,802 



69,956 23,647,862 



After this, it would be wasting space and time to go 
further. Whoever wants to figure out what, at this rate, 
has been the increase of farm acreage in Georgia during 
the decade, or what was the average in 1880, may do so. 
The Census Report offers opportunities for much amus- 
ing arithmetical exercise ; but save for this purpose, it is 
evidently not worth the paper on which it is printed. I 
have conclusively shown its utter unreliability, both as a 
whole and in its parts, and with this, must decline further 
controversy. Henry George. 

New York, June 15, 1883. 



II. 

CONDITION OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL 
LABORERS. 

THE following communication, from Mr. "William Saun- 
ders, of London, was called forth by a letter signed "A 
Free-bom Englishman," in which some of the statements 
made in Chapter X. of this book were in general terms 
denied. 

New York, July 24, 1883. 
To the Editor of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper : 

Sir— "A Free-born Englishman," who "emphatically 
denies" the accuracy of Mr. George's statements, is at a 
loss to conceive from what source he obtained his infor- 
mation. On this point I may enlighten him, as I can state 
from experience that Mr. George gained his knowledge by 
personal investigation in the location to which he refers, 
I wish that I could sustain the rose-colored view which 
" A Free-bom Englishman " takes of the condition of the 
agricultural laborer in England. For fifty years I have 
been intimately acquainted with the state of agriculture 
in the southern part of the country, and during that time 
the standard wages have varied from one and a half to 
three and a half doUars per week. In Wiltshire, at the 
present time, the wages are from two and a quarter to 
three dollars per week. It must be noted that these are 
the wages not of boys but of married men, and that they 



APPENDICES. 277 

are the total wages ; no food is given, and, as a rule, tlie 
laborers pay rent for a cottage, and always a very high 
rent for garden land, if they have any. Even the highest 
rate named is quite inadequate to provide a family with 
sufficient food of the plainest kind. It costs four doUars 
per week to provide food for five persons in the poorhouses 
of Wiltshire. Thus, if a man with a wife and three chil- 
dren spend all his wages for food he would still be short 
of the poorhouse allowance, which is calculated at a very 
low rate. 

The statement of " A Free-born Englishman " that it is 
a rare thing for the aged of the industrial classes to go to 
the workhouse is entirely contrary to my experience, and 
I may ask how is it possible for a man to save for old age 
when the laborer has to maintain himseK and his family 
upon a sum with which economical poor-law guardians 
cannot support paupers ? 

As to commons, they not only have been, but are being 
inclosed by the owners of land. This is also the case with 
spaces on the roadside, so that the working-classes have 
lost the means they formerly had for maintaining cows, 
donkeys or geese, and children have been deprived of their 
ancient playgrounds. As to foot-paths, these are often 
closed ; but your correspondent is right when he says that 
interrupting an ancient highway excites the indignation 
of the people, and sometimes they tear down the obstruc- 
tion. They did so recently in a case where Mr. E. P. 
Bouverie shut up a path near Devizes, in Wiltshire. Legal 
proceedings were taken, and, although it was proved that 
the public had enjoyed the use of the footway for over a 
century, yet the landlord was enabled to show that during 
this period the estate had been entailed, so that no owner 
had the power to give the public a right of way, and thus 
the path was closed. By these and similar provisions in 
laws enacted by landlords, it is possible for a landlord to 



278 APPENDICES, 

make constant encroachments upon the public ; for, if he 
maintains a claim for twenty years it is established in his 
favor, but no length of time can legalize the possession 
by the public against a claim raised by the owners of a 
family estate. Thus, all the time family estates are growing 
and the public are losing. 

In referring to a case near London, " A Free-born Eng- 
lishman" is misleading your readers. The people of 
Loudon insisted upon exempting an area of fifteen miles 
around that city from the operation of Commons Inclosure 
Acts, and, therefore, the instance to which he refers does 
not apply to England generally. 

It must be puzzling to Americans to meet with such 
different statements respecting English laborers, and as 
youi* correspondent does not give the public his name or 
address, it may be allowable to test his assertions by the 
internal evidence which his letter affords on the subject 
of his accuracy. He boldly asserts that " an equal dis- 
tribution of property is the general principle that under- 
lies " Mr. George's article, I challenge him to refer to a 
single paragraph in any of the voluminous writings of Mr. 
George which justifies the idea that he advocates an equal 
distribution of property. Mr. George's writings are a 
protest against the confiscation by landlords of property 
created by industry, and the statement that he advocates 
an equal distribution of property is entirely unfounded. 

Neither is your correspondent more happy in the asser- 
tion of his own principles than in his misrepresentation 
of Mr. George's views. He teUs us that " a man obtains 
in England, as in America and elsewhere, just so much 
for his labor as his labor is worth, according to the law 
of supply and demand." One illustration from each side 
of the Atlantic will disprove this assertion. In Wiltshire, 
England, thousands of acres of excellent land are unculti- 



APPENDICES. 279 

vated, while thousands of half-starved but willing workmen 
demand an opportunity for growing food for themselves 
and families. The- land remains out of cultivation, and 
the laborers remain without work, solely because a land- 
lord stands upon the land, and says to every farmer who 
wants to cultivate it, " You shall not do so unless you pay 
me six dollars an acre per annum, with an increase in 
future if I choose to demand it at the expiration of any 
year." If a working-man comes to the landlord and says 
to him, " Please let me have five acres of that land, upon 
which I wiU work and grow food for my own family and 
others," the landlord replies, "You shall not have that 
land unless you pay me fifteen dollars an acre per annum ; " 
and when the working-man asks why it is proposed to 
charge him so much more than is charged the farmer, 
the landlord tells him, " We do not want working-men to 
have land, lest the farmers should be unable to obtain 
laborers." Thus the land remains out of cultivation, and 
the laborer without work and without food, because the 
landlord stands between demand and supply. 

In New Jersey, not far from where I am writing, thou- 
sands of acres of land are producing miasma and mos- 
quitos. Thousands of willing hands would di*ain this 
land and cover it with houses and manufactories, but in 
the meantime a landlord's agent stands upon the marsh 
and demands, in the name of a man who has done nothing, 
a payment of one thousand dollars or two thousand dollars 
an acre before he will allow the mosquitos to be suppressed 
and houses and factories to be erected. 

Under these cii'cumstances your correspondent may 
well say, " I should be glad to learn where in this country, 
or in any other country on the globe, does a man who has 
not capital obtain the ' full fruits of his labor ' ? " True 
it is that those who have capital and those who can avail 



280 APPENDICES. 

themselves of tlie unjust privileges whicli law allows to 
capital, in connection with the possession of land, are the 
only persons who can obtain the full fruits of their own 
or other persons' labor ; and if the universality of injustice 
is a sound reason for upholding it, then undoubtedly Mr. 
George is in the wrong. 

I am wiUing to admit, as "A Free-born Englishman" 
contends, that in some respects the agricultural laborer is 
better off than his brother laborer in the crowded cities 
of Europe and America ; but, gracious heaven ! is this a 
matter for thankfulness ? I have had to spend the summer 
in New York, and with every alleviation that can be pro- 
vided, my fate has been hard enough ; but what must be 
the condition of families crowded into tenement-houses 
during the summer heat? No man ought to think of it 
without a determination to do aU in his power to lessen 
such terrible suffering. And this suffering, in New York 
and other cities, is the direct and immediate result of 
landlordism. In London, landlords demand and receive 
thirty millions of dollars annually from the working- 
classes, and they are constantly raising their demands. 
This is the cause of overcrowding. Every month land- 
lords kin more children than Herod destroyed in his 
lifetime ; and yet, as your correspondent reminds us, they 
are men of excellent character. That they are all honor- 
able men, I do not dispute ; but the circumstance does not 
lessen the fearful consequences of the system of which they 
are the agents. It is not of abuses that we complain, but 
of the necessary consequences of landlordism, which, like 
a huge vise, crushes the masses of the people with more 
horrible effect at every turn of the screw. Industry, intel- 
ligence and invention hold out promises of improvement 
which seem to be almost within our reach, but before 
they are obtained the landlord advances his claims and 
the resuk is disappointment and misery. If this state of 



APPENDICES. 281 

things continues, it will be tlie fault, not of the landlords, 
but of working-men who have the power, and should have 
the determination, to deliver themselves and their children 
from a fatal influence. I am, 

Yours respectfully, 

WmLiAJi Saunders. 



m. 

A PIECE OF LAND. 

BY FRANCIS G. SHAW. 

Scene— J. Common. Labor digging the ground with a stick, 
to plant potatoes. Capital passing with a spade on his 
shoulder, 

ZABOE. I say, Capital, shall you use your spade this 
/ year? 

Capital. No, I'm going a-fishing. 

Labor. Lend it to me, then. 

Capital. Why should I ? 

Labor. As a good neighbor. You don't want it, and it 
would be a great help to me. I could plant more ground, 
and, perhaps, raise fifty more bushels of potatoes, if I 
had it. 

Capital. That's a very one-sided reason. You'd wear it 
out by the end of the year. You'd have your fifty bushels 
extra, and I should have no spade. You'd be so much 
better off, and I should be so much worse off than I am 
now. There's not much good-neighborhood in that. 

Labor. Oh, I'd give it back to you just as good as it is 
now ; or I'd make a new one for you. 

[Note.— This is the necessary maintenance or replacement of 
capital which is consumed by use.] 



APPENDICES. 283 

Capital. That's rather better, but still it's not fair. 
You'd have your fifty bushels more, which you couldn't 
have raised without my spade, while I should be no better 
off than I am now. No, thank you ! I'll keep my spade. 
Go make one for yourself. It took me ten days to make 
this. 

Labor. Yes, but this is the season for planting, and I 
haven't the time to spare ; I want to use it now. I can't 
see why you shouldn't let me have it as well as leave it to 
rust, which it will since you're not going to use it. 

Capital. It's not going to rust. I'll tell you what I 
mean to do with it : Farmer wants a spade as well as 
you, and offers to give a yearling heifer in exchange for 
this one. I'm on my way now to make the swap, and get 
her. I shall turn her out on the common, and by the end 
of the year I shall have a cow with, perhaps, a caK by her 
side. Don't you think she'll be worth a good deal more 
than the new spade you offer ? 

[Note. —Capital proposes to take advantage of the active forces 
of nature which manifest themselves in growth as well as in the 
productiveness of land, and which can be made available by Laboe, 
or by Capital, the result of Laboe.] 

Labor. Certainly she will. I never thought of that! 
Yes ; if you can swap your spade for the heifer, you've a 
right to as much return from one as from the other. But 
how much do you expect to gain if you do make the 
exchange ? 

Capital. I suppose quite as much as ten bushels of your 
potatoes will be worth when you dig them. 

Labor. I'll take the spade and give you a new one and 
ten bushels of potatoes. Will that satisfy you ? 

Capital. I've rather set my heart on the heifer, and, 
besides, your crop may fail. 

Labor. I hope notj it never has. However, there is 



284 APPENDICES. 

some little risk, I admit, and I'll give you twelve bushels 
instead of ten. "What do you say? 

Capital. It's a bargain ! Here's the spade, and I'U go 
?.nd see about my boat. 

[Note.— Thus Labor employs the wealth which Capital has 
accmniilated. by his past labor, and as both are interested in the crop, 
Labor and Capitai, become partners. The ten bushels which 
Capital is to receive for the use of the spade may be called interest, 
to which he is justly entitled, from his ability to exchange the spade 
for something which will give him an equal profit by its mere growth, 
and the other two bushels are for insurance against the risk of a 
failure of the crop.] 

Enter Landowner. 

Landowner {leaning over fence). Hullo, Labor ! What 
are you at work on that moorland for ? The soil is much 
better on this side of the fence. You can raise fifty bushels 
more potatoes here than you can there, with the same 
work. You'd much better hire this lot of me ; I wouldn't 
charge you much for the use of it. 

Labor. It's true that the soil is better, and I should 
plant there if you hadn't fenced it in ; but you know as 
well as I do that this common is free, and that everything 
I can raise on it is mine ; while if I should plant on that 
side of the fence you'd clap me into jail for trespassing, 
or else you'd let me raise a crop and then take all away 
from me, unless I came to your terms. The laws seem to 
be made for you landowners ! What right had you to 
fence in the best land ? It was all common once. If you 
were cultivating it, I wouldn't have a word to say ; your 
right to it is as good as mine, or that of anybody else ; 
but it's no better, and I don't see what right you have to 
keep me off of it, when you don't want to cultivate it 
yourself. 

Landowner. I did cultivate it for some years, and I 



APPENDICES. 285 

fenced it to keep the cattle away ; I hauled off the stone 
and drained it, and got good crops. 

Labor. Did the crops repay you for what you laid out ? 

Landoivner. Pretty well, you may believe; you don't 
suppose that I was such a fool as to make the improve- 
ments if I hadn't been sure of that. But I've got some 
better land that I mean to till this year, and I should like 
to let this lot to you at a fair rent. 

Lobar. Yes ; I suppose you have taken the cream out of 
this. But what do you call a f au' rent ? 

Landoivner. Let me see ! The land is still a good deal 
better than the common, and easier to work than when I 
inclosed it. The drains are there, and there are no stones 
on the ground ; besides, the fence is good for three years, 
and you'll have to fence your common lot if you want to 
make a crop. That's something for you to consider. 
These are real advantages. 

Labor. Yes, that's so. Well ! I think it will be fair if 
I agree to give you one-third the value of the fence ; say, 
ten bushels of potatoes, and five bushels more on account 
of the other improvements. 

Landoivner. "Will you keep the fence in as good repair 
as it is now ? 

Labor. No ; fifteen bushels is as much as I can afford 
to give. 

Landowner. And how much will you give for the use of 
the land? 

Labor. Nothing whatever. I pay you so much for the 
use of your improvements, and that's so much gain to 
you, for you've already been well paid for them by the 
crops you've taken off, which have diminished the fertility 
of the son. I'm willing to pay for the benefit I shall derive 
from them, and nothing else. If you won't let me have 
the land for the fifteen bushels, I'll stick to the common ; 
I can do about as well here. But you haven't told me 



286 APPENDICES, 

what right you had to fence in the best land, and call it 
yours ? 

Landotmer. The king gave it to me. 

Labor. What right had the king to take away the 
people's land, and give it to you ? 

Landowner. No matter whether he had the right or not ; 
he had the might. The land is mine, and you cannot 
cultivate it without my permission. 

Labor. Well ! We won't discuss the question of right 
just now. WiU you let me have the lot for the year at 
the price I offer ? 

Landowner. Yes ; you may have it. It's so much gain 
to me ; but if it wasn't for that confounded common you 
should pay more. 



ANOTHER YEAR. 



(In the meanwhile Landowner has succeeded in getting 
through Parliament an Act authorizing him to inclose the 
common, and has taken possession. He has accordingly 
fenced in the whole of it. Ifot against cattle this time, but 
against Labor.) 

Labor, going to Landowner. Please, sir, as the common 
is inclosed, I've now no free land to work upon, and I 
should be very glad to hire that same lot of you for another 
year. 

Landowner. Humph ! You did pretty weU on that lot 
last year, didn't you ? 

Labor. Yes, sir! I was able to give Capital a new 
spade, besides paying him for the use of his ; and I had 
enough over to keep my family in comfort after paying 
you the rent 



APPENDICES. 287 

Landowner. And you expect to get the land for the 
same rent this year ? 

Labor. I hope that you will let me have it on the same 
terms, sir. If I'm obliged to pay more I shall not be able 
to give Capital so much for the use of his spade, and my 
family wiU suffer for want of the comforts to which they 
have been accustomed. 

Landowner. That's none of my business. Capital must 
be content with a smaller return, and you must reduce 
the expenses of your family. There's no common for you 
to cultivate now, or for him to pasture his heifer on. You 
must both of you cut your coat according to your cloth, 
and wear your old clothes when you have no cloth. 

Labor. I'm aware of that, sir, and can only hope that 
you will consider my circumstances. 

Landowner. What I shall consider wiU. be my own 
interest. I shall manage my estate on strictly business 
principles. You paid me fifteen bushels of potatoes on 
account of my improvements last year. We agreed upon 
that as fair, didn't we ? 

Labor. Yes, sir. 

Landoivner. Well ! I'll be easy with you and charge you 
no more this year ; but you must keep the fence in repair. 

Labor. It wiU be very hard on me, sir, taking so much 
from the support of my family ; but I suppose that I must 
do as you say ; and if I must, I must. 

Landowner. Now how much wiU you agree to give me 
for the use of my land ? Last year you wouldn't give me 
anything, and I had to come to your terms, because you 
had the common to faU back upon. This year there's no 
common, and you've got to come to mine. 

Labor. 1 hope, sir, that they will be such as to enable 
me to live and keep my family comfortably, which will 
be hard work enough now, with the additional work I'm 
obUged to put upon the fence. 



288 APPENDICES. 

Landowner. Comfortably! I don't know and I don't 
care. You ought to be satisfied with, the necessaries of 
life, and not talk about luxuries. But there's no use in 
wasting any more talk about the matter. The rent of the 
lot for this year is fifty bushels in aU. 

Labor. But, sir,— 

Landowner. But me no Buts. That's the rent, 

Laho?'. We shall starve, sir, and then your land will be of 
no use to you. You must have somebody to cultivate it. 

Landowner. There's something in that ; but, as I said, 
fifty bushels is the rent. You know that you must take 
the land at my price, and I know you'll make the shift to 
pull through. If you can't, and I find that you really 
haven't enough to live on, perhaps I'U not exact the whole 
of the rent, but let a part remain in arrears, for you to 
make up when you have an extra good year, and I wiU 
give you some of the smaU potatoes in charity, to keep 
you alive and out of the poorhouse— where {aside) I should 
have to pay for the whole support of you and your family. 




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